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Work, bartleby-the-scrivener-61, call center SLP, convenience store woman,…

- - - - Repetition: The routine of going to work keeps Candace grounded during the Shen fever outbreak. The zombies also exhibit repetitive behaviors surrounding nostalgia, but Candace is able to live in the present by burying herself in her work during the Fever.
        
        "It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly. I got up. I went to work in the morning. Outside the office windows, the city thinned out" (Ma 210).
      - Immigration: Candace's parents and childhood in China affect her financial habits, which ultimately dictate her choice in career. Her mother especially loved name brand American products that she could finally afford when she moved to the US, and Candace inherited her mother's expensive tastes. Candace needs the secure paycheck from Spectra to keep up her lifestyle.
        
        "It didn’t matter what she bought; she just wanted to parade her fancy American luxury wares to her two younger sisters back in Fuzhou" (Ma 42).
      - Passion: Photography is Candace's passion, but she doesn't pursue photography as her career because she only sees it as a hobby rather than serious work. She is not passionate about her job at Spectra, but she appreciates the financial stability it provides.
        
        "Is your interest in being an artist or is your interest in working in book production? I hesitated. I do dabble in photography. But obviously, that doesn’t pay the bills" (73).
  - - - Asia: The feeling transfer office that the main character works in is alluded to be somewhere in Asia, likely similar to call centers in the real world. Labor is cheaper in some parts of Asia, so many companies in the US outsource to save money. "Standard Loneliness Package" satirizes this phenomenon.
        
        "...The Executive is lying on a beach...looking at the bluest ocean I have ever seen. I saw this on American television at the lunch counter across the street that has a satellite feed. I was eating at the counter and next to me was a girl, maybe four or five....I was thinking about how sad it was that she had never seen water that color in real life until I realized that I was thirty-nine years old and hey, you know what, neither had I" (Yu).
      - Financial Instability: In "Standard Loneliness package" Yu is critiquing corporations' need to commercialize everything and maximize profits by abusing their workers' need for financial stability. The main character often comments on the high price tag of his services while the company is constantly cutting costs, making the worker's lives miserable. The main character only does feeling transfer work because he needs money.
        
        "Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting. But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them....So now, what’s left over, what we get to feel at work, it’s all pretty much just pure undiluted badness" (Yu).
    - - Repetition and Routine: Keiko finds the repetition and routine of the Convenience store comforting, which indicates that she is coded to be neurodivergent (likely autistic). The repeated motions of stocking shelves and predictable noises may make the convenience store a safe sensory environment for her.
        
        "When I can’t sleep, I think about the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night. That pristine aquarium is still operating like clockwork. As I visualize the scene, the sounds of the store reverberate in my eardrums and lull me to sleep" (Sayaka 19).
      - Passion: Keiko loves every aspect of her job. She believes that she was born to do this work. The convenience store is the only thing she speaks about lovingly, and often treats it as its own entity.
        
        "And then the store’s voice began streaming into me. All its sounds quivered with meaning, the vibrations speaking directly to my cells, like music to my ears. I knew instinctively what this store needed without even having to think about it" (Sayaka 83).
      - Asia: Convenience Store Woman takes place in Japan, where the work culture is very strict. Everyone is expected to work longer hours and advance to higher paying jobs, which is what makes Keiko's choice to stay at the convenience store seem so rebellious and unfavorable to her friends and family.
        
        "When I was in my early twenties it wasn’t unusual to be a freeter, so I didn’t really need to make excuses. But subsequently everyone started hooking up with society, either through employment or marriage, and I was the only one who hadn’t done either" (Sayaka 25).
      - Rejecting Society: Keiko found contentment in a low paying job and staying single. The convenience store provides an acceptance that she does not get from her friends and family. Keiko demonstrates that you doesn't need to find a high paying, impressive job just because that is what society has said to do.
        
        "'More than a person, I’m a convenience store worker. Even if that means I’m abnormal and can’t make a living and drop down dead, I can’t escape that fact'" (Sayaka 85).
  - - - Historical Setting: Set during the industrial revolution in New York City, "Bartleby the Scrivener" shows the boom in office jobs at this time. Jobs like Bartleby's start appearing to take on the plethora of paperwork that builds up as cities get larger.
        
        "Now my original business-- that of a conveyancer and title hunter, and drawer-up of recondite documents of all sorts-- was considerably increased by receiving the master's office. There was now great work for scriveners" (Melville 6).
      - Rejecting Society: Bartleby challenges the status quo in a way that is confusing to those around him; he was good at his job, but "preferred not" to work anymore out of the blue. He never states his reasons for this behavior either, which leads to the narrator filling in his own ideas of the source of the rebellion. Bartleby explores how others react if we ignore our societal responsibilities and stop working.
        
        "What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach" (Melville 15).
    - - Social Standing: Stevens serves Lord Darlington, which earns him a level of respectability. Stevens' job is also to maintain the high social standing of the manor with his servitude.
        
        "Indeed, you will appreciate that to have served his lordship at Darlington Hall during those years was to come as close to the hub of this world's wheel as one such as I could ever have dreamt" (Ishiguro 126).
      - Historical Setting: Remains of the Day flashes back to the days preceding and during WWII, where we learn that Lord Darlington was associated with the Nazis. Stevens tries to ignore this facet of his employer's history because it clashes with his ideals of dignity.
        
        "But [Mrs. Barnet] was too, of course, a member of Sir Oswald Mosely's 'blackshirts' organization, and the very little contact his lordship ever had with Sir Oswald occurred during those few weeks of that summer. And it was during those same weeks that those... incidents took place.... I call them 'incidents' but some of these were extremely minor" (Ishiguro 146).
      - Passion: Stevens is passionate about the idea of "dignity" and takes pride in his work because he believes it allows him to strive for this ideal.
        
        "... I believe strongly that this "dignity' is something one can meaningfully strive for throughout one's career" (Ishiguro 33).
- - - - "The steady completion of tasks felt right. Mae checked her bracelet, which showed hundreds of new smiles. There was something refreshing, the comments were asserting, about seeing a Circle semi-celebrity like herself contributing to the data pool like this" (Eggers 376).
    - - "To have the validation of the Wise Men, to have perhaps pivoted the entire company in a new direction...could it be that the Circle, with her new idea, might really perfect democracy? Could she have conceived of the solution to a thousand-year-old problem?" (Eggers 392).
- - - - Social Standing: As the title of this novel suggests, it is not enough for the protagonist and the pretty girl to make a decent income; their goal is to become rich. The work that they choose is more than a way to earn money. It is a ticket into a lifestyle with a higher social status so they can leave their past of poverty behind them.
        
        "You are like a living memory and she, who is implacably resistant to remembering, is unsettled by you. Your manner of speech... still carries the cadences of how she once spoke... a neighborhood she is glad to have fled and to which she does not want to return..." (Hamid 88).
      - Asia: Asia is a large continent, home to many different types of cultures. Yet, Hamid is still able to write generally by referencing the broad cultural phenomenon of people migrating to cities to find work. As rural life became financially unsustainable and cities grew, people moved as the family of the protagonist did. Hamid also references the overcrowding common in many Asian cities due to the immense population and migration.
        
        "Your city is not laid out like a single-celled organism, with a wealthy nucleus surrounded by an ooze of slums. It lacks sufficient mass transit to move all of its workers twice daily in the fashion this would require" (Hamid 20).
      - Financial Instability:This story is about people finding work in places with few opportunities for traditional, secure jobs. The protagonist builds his career by exploiting the lack of governmental safety regulation for food and water becomes wealthy, but he loses his fortune because of the rapid industrialization of Asia. The protagonist's story critiques capitalism by showing how no one is safe when profit comes before people.
        
        "'If we don't borrow,' he says, 'we'll die.'.... 'We don't have scale. The sector's consolidating. In two years, there won't be a dozen water firms operating in this city. There'll be three. At most four. And we won't be one of them'"(Hamid 178).