The main characters in three short stories are alienated from other people and from life. The stories are Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace." Brown in Hawthorne's story is alienated from his wife, from those in his community, and from himself because he believes in the Puritan religion and sees himself as a sinner. Bartleby's alienation in Melville's story is a mystery. The reader does not know why he is alienated, but Bartleby lives an unhappy life separate from others and dies an unhappy life alone. Mathilde in Guy de Maupassant's story is a woman who leads her life according to what others want or expect of her. Because of this, she never becomes truly herself and cannot connect with others in a real way which would overcome her alienation. All of the characters are unable to love, to think for themselves, or to connect with other human beings and God.
Brown is not evil, but he lives in a Puritan society which tells him that evil is everywhere. He is only a man who does what human beings do, including having sex and having an imagination. However, his Puritan world tells him that a man is either all good or all evil. That Puritan world convinces him he is evil because he has what he sees as evil thoughts. If he has any evil in him, then he must be evil, according to Puritan belief. Brown is not strong enough to think for himself and to try to love his wife and others even though he knows there is evil inside of himself. The terrible ceremony which Brown and his wife Faith go through in the forest is symbolic of Brown's terrible alienation. He sees himself as evil, which means that he is alienated from God, from others, from his wife, from himself, and from his own soul. This is what he believes because this is the only way he knows to look at life and himself. He has been made such a part of Puritan society that he is not able to think ...