Alienation as a Major Feature of Character Behavior

Social alienation of the primeval character is also a musical composition in Poe's "The Purloined earn," and though the manifest mood of the composition is less bleak than that of Conrad, it contains elements that notify latent knowledge of evil and deliberate dissociation from the genial mainstream. Alienation is the dominant theme and narrative dynamic of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which portrays Bartleby as deliberately positioning himself on the social and transpersonal periphery and the lawyer as socially (and unwillingly) alienated not only from Bartleby in particular but also from the higher society to which he aspires to belong in general.

In Heart of Darkness Conrad think the remote environment of the river in the Congo with the environment of European colonialism in Africa and the exotic mystery of Mr. Kurtz to create a charnel story that has resonance with what Martin Luther King, Jr., called in a not misrelated context "the bleakness of nagging despair" (91). The figure of Marlow, who tells the story of Kurtz, is consistent with alienation and separation from both Africa and Europe. He explains that his puzzle as a sailor is darker and more alien than that of roughly of his mates. He is "not typical" of most seamen, who lead a "sedentary life" (Conrad 7) by virtue of their being at home only abo

In his passivity and mild dissatisfaction with his life, the lawyer in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" canister be contrasted with Dupin, who is as content with his status as a recluse as he is confident of his powers. To the degree Bartleby is ever with him, he can also be compared to Marlow, whose tenure in a remote place is overtaken by his connection to Kurtz, whose lot transforms, hobbles, and then haunts consciousness and physical experience for years afterward.

Achebe, Chinua. "Chinua Achebe: The artwork of Fiction." Interview by Jerome Brooks (New York, 1990). Paris Review, 36 (Winter 1994): 142-166.

"The Purloined Letter" has been interpreted along more serious psychological lines, with the interpretations focal point less on character traits than on the narrative situation, including the (never explicitly revealed) contents of the letter itself. The contents are the rather celebrated postmodern focus of Jacques Lacan. Schweizer cites Lacan's description of the "inferred" contents of the letter as erotic (65f). That would be consistent with the Prefect's account of the lady receiving a letter in the royal boudoir, concealing it from her husband entered, and helplessness to prevent Minister D from appropriating it brazenly and openly (Poe 210). yet the lady's sexual indiscretion, compounded by a lover-suitor's stupidity in writing to her, could explain why the alert Minister D could blackmail her and/or the lover-suitor and place the stability of the government in jeopardy. According to Schweizer (passim), Lacan's interpretation of this aspect of the story includes a similarity between the wish to know the letter's contents and the wish to know a woman's body and its erotic secrets.

The connection between the theme of alienation and Lacan's interpretation can be found in the figure of Minister D, who, alienates himself by way of power unobtainable to the mainstream of French society. The Minister's aggressively amoral behavior also positions him as an syndicalist vis-?-vis
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