Cody Santana Essay Draft

Cody Santana

10/17/20

                             The Spirit of Perverseness

               In the two stories we will be discussing today which are Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and Melvilles “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street”we have two prominent characters which both have a desire to achieve something greater and in many ways that makes them alike, but they also have a lot of characteristics which separate them, and these are shown through how they attempt to each achieve their individual goals, and how each of their decisions in this pursuit effects the other characters around them in each of their stories. I believe both these characters share one common characteristic that will be the main theme of the essay which is defined by Poe the writer of the Black Cat the ‘Spirit of Perverseness”. His definition is “”What makes people do things they know are bad for themselves”. A very simple way to define such a complicated topic but where does this relate to our two characters? Each of these characters are trying to achieve their goals by doing things that are ultimately bad for their own wellbeing, the difference between the two characters is that one of them we know what their end goal is while the other character we will have to take a deeper dive to even try to piece together what they want to achieve in the story. 

              In the story written by Kafka “The Hunger Artist” we see a man who is not named (so we will just call him Hunger Artist) being used as a circus act of sorts. He is essentially known as the Hunger Artist, a man who starves himself for several weeks at a time. He is also monitored and locked within a cage. People come out to see the hunger artist in his cage just to see what a man who doesn’t eat anything for so long looks like. He is a very popular attraction for the circus and as such the people who run the circus want to keep him maintained. They give him a strict time period where he can and cannot eat. The Hunger Artist wants to surpass 40 days, it is his ultimate goal to break his own record, but the people who run the show won’t allow him. This always infuriates him and his way of retaliating he just doesn’t speak, which heavily affects the way the show works because when people come to see him they like to talk with him in the hopes of their questions being answered. Without him speaking the show is more or less just people staring at a hungry man. This man lives and breaths the spirit of perverseness. His own goals derive from something he very much knows could kill him down the line.

              In Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story on Wall Street” we have Bartleby, who isn’t the main character per say, but is very much the center of the story. When he first starts working at the lawyers office as a scrivener he is very efficient at his job, gets things done very quick and is quiet, and he is not in anyone’s way. But over time he begins to just stop doing his work, whenever he gets asked to do something he simply replies “I would prefer not to” or “I would rather not”. Even when he gets fired he comes to work and just kinda sits around and gets in everyone’s way. Eventually the lawyer tries to help him but is not met with a good response so he ends up getting Bartleby arrested and sent to jail. Even when he is locked away he continues to refuse to do what anyone says, he even refuses to eat the food given to him when asked to eat it which leads to his eventual death in the story. Now there are a lot of things to cover here but what i want to look at is how Bartleby shows his own spirit of perverseness. He simply chooses not to listen to anyone and pretty much all the time it’s to his disadvantage, he gets fired, sent to jail, and then dies because of his actions. I am certain that Bartleby knows he shouldn’t be doing this, but there has to be something that drives him to do all these nonsensical things.