Life is driven with the fear of being failed by the shadow of darkness, or driven by the quietness of it. It is what conflicts people with the constant struggle between wanting to stay and needing to leave. Thriving on sadness and misery, characters Bartleby from Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Sonny from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” believed it conveyed a stronger emotion than the banal joys of everyday, for it was their shade of light, and in which different forms of intimacy is shown throughout in both of the stories. It could be as vital as looking in someone’s eye when told something no one knows about, and often it is the things left unsaid. Both of their lives are held in a paper town with crumbling concrete and fragile
