Fate and Humans

Fate and Humans
The Ambitious Guest
 

    Along with Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered as an American Dark Romanticism writer. In Dark Romantic novels, the natural world is dark and mysterious, and it reveals itself to humans as evil. Humans tend to be vain and not wise. The Ambitious Guest by Nathaniel Hawthorne has some of these characteristics of Dark Romanticism and in this story, with fate; the story shows the helpless and vain humans in front of fate.

     The story starts with a nice scene of one family gathering around their hearth, smiling and laughing. Father and mother “had a sober gladness” on their faces, children laughed, the eldest daughter, seventeen, “was the image of Happiness”, the aged grandmother “was the image of Happiness grown old.” This happiness is, however soon interrupted by the appearance of the ambitious guest, a young man with an ambitious dream: “He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave.” To the family the guest says that he cannot die until he achieves his destiny, and then “let Death come: I shall have built my monument.” The father of the house is soon affected by the abstract dream of ‘wanting his own monuments’, dreaming of having a good farm, earning reputation as an honest man. The seventeen-year-old daughter smiled with sadness, recognizing her lonesomeness. The grandmother expresses her dream of having her grave well-arranged, and how she is worried about it. And all these dreams ended soon after, when the rockslide came. They “fled right into the pathway of destruction”, and “the victims were at peace. Their bodies were never found.”

     Here it seems like Hawthorne wanted to show the helpless and vain humans. The families were helpless; they could have lived throughout the slide if they listened to its sound carefully and noticed that it would not affect their fireplace like it did before. They could have also lived when others listened to the little boy and actually went to the Flume, and they could have lived when the father did not hesitate to open the doors-as usual-for the wagon riders, letting them take the family a ride to the Flume like what the little boy said again. Chances did come-chances that could keep them alive. However, they did not take all these chances, and it shows that they were determined to die throughout the rockslide. The stranger could not say “let Death come” after he achieved his “destiny”; Death came no matter when he wanted it to come, and he could do nothing about it. They- the families and the stranger- were helpless because they could not change their fate to the way they wanted but had to get what was determined for them.

     In front of their fate, every ambition of them was vain. No matter what they dreamed about their monuments, their fate was there, waiting for them. The families and the stranger dreamed about their monuments, but they were actually remembered by their death under the rockslide, and the stranger was even doubted to have existed. The grandmother would have never had her fine grave-clothes she had prepared years before, and did not have to worry about her grave because she could not even have one; her body was never found. 

     The story, moreover, made me think about myself; I myself have my own dreams, and most of them are distant from now. But who knows if I die from an earthquake several minutes from now? That thought really made me feel helpless, and soon one more thought came to my mind; that those concerns would not stop me from dreaming. I will dream about my distant future, though something strong like fate may distort my way toward there; it is because that is the best thing I can do. That is the best thing I can do if, for instance, Death is there waiting for me. But not only dreaming like what the ambitious guest did-he has done nothing-, rather I will be trying to do something right now, this every instant to achieve my dream, because again, happily running towards my dream every instant is the best thing I can do as a helpless human, if humans really are.

Comments

Joelle S.W. Jung: I agree on your basic point that we plan ahead too much when we could die today. Carpe diem, and memento mori, as they say. Your point seems slightly different than what Hawthorne intended, though. Could you make the link * here much clearer? Why did you get that impression?

(I deleted the part * when modifying my essay.)

Hyejoon Lee: I don’t think the biggest theme of this story is ‘fate’ but it’s really interesting that you actually thought that this was about fate. So, because your topic itself is quite unique, I think you should have elaborated more on why you believe FATE is the theme rather than spending the whole second paragraph on what would have happened instead. And about the “meaningless” part, maybe the whole ambition was not all meaningless because it had some impact on the family. Actually, it had a big impact. If it wasn’t for the fervor created by the ambition, the family would have spent a peaceful and calm afternoon and wouldn’t have (as Mr. Menard mentioned before) ran out so blindly “into” the rockslide. So ambition is what killed the family.