“Bartleby the Scrivener” vs. “A Hunger Artist”
... a series of stages. In the beginning he was all about work. “At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion” (Melville). But when it came to being asked to do anything besides copying like taking on other jobs in the office or even making himself more comfortable he would always respond “I’d prefer not to”. The next stage that Bartleby went through was doing absolutely nothing. He preferred not to work and at the same time he preferred not to quit. “‘Will you, or will you not quit, me’ I now demanded in a sudden passion advancing closer to him. ‘I would prefer not to quit you’, he replied, gently emphasizing the not.” The final stage in the story of Bartleby is when he is in jail. Even with the extra money that the Melville gave to the prison guard to get extra care for Bartleby, there was no helping him and in the end he ended up starving to death because he preferred not to eat. Throughout the entire story Melville tries to help Bartleby in anyway he can, but there is no helping Bartleby. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. I’m not sure exact reason of why he acted the way he did, but it definitely had to be something. I personally think that in general Bartleby was just an unhappy person. He was stubborn, he didn’t want to try or do anything that he wasn’t sure of. Bartleby was also extremely anti social, he didn’t seem to know how to interact with other people which could be another reason for why he acted the way that he did. Unlike Bartleby, the hunger artist in Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” knew what he wanted with his life; he wanted to be able to break his record of fasting for 40days, he wanted to fast longer than anyone had ever fast before. His whole life was based on fasting, it was what he did best it was also all he knew. “Ironically he feels strongest when he fast and nauseous when he eats whereas most people feel nauseous when they do not eat” (Unknown). People were no longer interested in hunger artists, but this was not a problem for the hunger artist in fact it didn’t really faze him because he honestly did care for the people; they would never understand. He joined the circus where he was eventually forgotten about until one day when an overseer’s eye fell on the change. When asked if he was still fasting the hunger artist replied “of course”. The hunger artist then told the overseer not to admire him because he could help fasting and when the overseer asked why he couldn’t help fasting, the hunger artist told him; “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”(Kafka). Those were his last words. The story ends in a kind of ironic twist when the hunger artist is replaced by the panther. The huger artist sends his life livi...