Dissection of inclusion and exclusion in "Bartelby" (Melville) "The Sculptor's Funeral" (Cather) "The Minister's Black Veil" (Hawthorne) and the novella "Of Mice and Men" (Steinbeck)

"And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us." -Gibran Khalil Gibran "The Madman". Shed your masks, show your faces, and you will be isolated. As the madman rushes into the market place the village folk laugh or shy away in fear; and in a damning, liberating stroke a youth proclaims "He is a …

…brand, sector, group or society that they can possibly find consumers for. And always there will be those who do not belong, who are singled out specifically because they don't share the same attributes as everyone else. The Lennys the Ministers, the Harveys, and the Bartelbys will always exist among our societies alongside the Ranch-Hands, the Townsfolk, the Business Men, and the Wall Street Communities and they will always be ostracized, rejected, and eventually, forgotten.