The Ambitious Guest

The Ambitious Guest

Spoiler alert: you will read the ending here. It's a quick read...3280 words.

I hear this story as a teleplay, as I have heard other stories of Hawthorne's that way in my recent reading. Particularly in the last paragraph of this story, like that of Wakefield, I hear the cadences of spoken word. I expect I encounter the narrator's voice more on television than in modern short stories. Is it that stories in the past were written to be read aloud to a degree that they are not today, though teleplays are, and perhaps that is what I hear?

Whose was the agony of that death moment? Strange last line. Why whose?

More like WHAT was the agony at that death moment? We are to think it wasn't so much the agony of death, that he could bear. But dying unknown, perhaps unidentified, oh what tragedy for the youth and his ambitions.

I suppose "Whose was the agony..." is the author's sly wink and acknowledgment of his own ambitions.

There were circumstances which led some to suppose that a stranger had been received into the cottage on this awful night, and had shared the catastrophe of all its inmates.

Circumstances? Like bones?

Wakefield

Read Wakefield here

I like this story if only for the soothing W throughout. This line resonates with me, "when she had been more years a widow than a wife..." I feel like I approach that day myself.

Of course, in the story it's all a cruel caprice and Wakefield's wife is no more a widow than I am. Wicked man, that Wakefield. Worst sort of procrastinator he turned out to be. What did he do all that time? That's what I wonder whenever I read this story. How did he earn his bread? What sort of credentials did he provide his new landlady?

Hawthorne would have us believe Wakefield set off on a tangent and could not find his way back for twenty years. And if I knew where he went to work, maybe I could believe that.

The ending caught my attention this time around. I feel Rod Serling's cadence and can well imagine him speculating about Wakefield becoming, as it were, a denizen of the Twilight Zone. Can you hear it too?

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, an Outcast of the Universe.

I imagine Hawthorne in an attic more years than miles from where I sit trying to wrest a living from his writing. Oh, what teleplays he might have written.