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Essay On Bartleby The Race And Araby Counterpart

Decent Essays

Three critical essays that presented strong approaches to Joyce’s stories are “Counterparts,” “After the Race,” and “Araby.” The critical approach for Joyce’s “Counterparts” named “Farrington the Scrivener: A Story of Dame Street” by Morris Beja compared Farrington to that of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853). While Melville’s Bartleby was ambitious, Joyce’s Farrington was quite the opposite, an “anti-Bartleby,” with physicality, ambition, and how they handle themselves with violence (Beja 319). Despite these representations, Beja makes a point to say that Joyce forces readers to understand Farrington. Beja, however, wants to make the literary criticism’s reader to “realize our own kinship with him, but most of us are readier to identify with his son, or even with Bartleby” (Beja 320). Then, Beja begins to find their similarities, including their defiance toward their bosses. Beja stated that the comparison may suggest a similar forces are present in their lives which may be hard to …show more content…

This coping mechanism is ruinous and irrational, but many people make decisions that are irrational in stressful situations in which they cannot escape. This brings the reader closer to Farrington as Beja wanted. It is further important to understanding Farrington as the irrational, vengeance-filled character he is. Through this analysis, he becomes a more relatable character. The second approach written by James Fairhall (“Big-Power Politics and Colonial Economics: The Gordon Bennett Cup Race and ‘After the Race’”) delved into the economic and political issues that the cup and each of the men represented throughout the night after the race. The criticism ultimately decides that when Ireland was involved with international powers in a competition, the Irish would not win (Fairhall

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