FREE ESSAY ON CHARACTERIZATION IN POE, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE

CHARACTERIZATION IN POE, HAWTHORNE, AND MELVILLE

What makes a story different from a tale lies in the author's choice of characterization.
When we have little physical detail about the character as is Hawthorne's "Young Goodman
Brown" and Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" the story becomes more of a tale. In a tale,
it is possible to remove almost all of the physical detail about the character and still
achieve the same effect. If you remove the known detail, what little there is, in "Young
Goodman Brown" it might have the same effect as, "A man walked into the woods….."
This however cannot be achieved in Herman Melville's "Bartleby The Scribner". If you
remove the detail about the life of the narrator then you remove the essence of the story
in itself.
In "Bartleby The Scribner", we are given enough detail about the characters that we are
able to answer why a character thinks a certain way. It is only through the details about
the narrator's business and the people that work for him that we can understand why
Bartleby's behavior is so perplexing. The details show how ordinary, or plain the
narrator's life is until Bartleby arrives and seems to change everything. The characters
almost become real. In "The Cask of Amontillado" we cannot attempt to understand why
Montresor seeks revenge so badly, we are just told that he does. If the reader were given
more insight into the relationship between Fortunato and Montresor then we might be able
to understand why he seeks revenge. Any physical detail given to us only serves what Poe
calls "the single effect". We are told that Fortunato is wearing a jester's hat to point
out that he is a fool, adding to the humiliation to follow. The fact that he is wearing
the hat, however, does not give the reader any insight to his psychology. Thus the
characters become abstractions that exist only in our minds. They do not have real life
counterparts. 
By placing more emphasis on plot than characterization, Poe and Hawthorne were able to
create a tale in which the characters only exist in the readers mind and the story
becomes more of a tale. However, Melville was able to create characters that seem to
escape the readers mind and the plot is moved forward through examination of these
characters.