Point Of View In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter

In the novel Scarlet letter written by Nathaniel Hawthorne gives his open opinion quite often. In fact the Scarlet Letter is written in a third person omniscient point of view. This mean that Hawthorne is able to tell the reader certain things that the reader could not figure out with just literary analysis alone. Hawthorne first demonstrates this third person omniscient point of view when he writes “With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart, with first a flush and

The author goes on to write “He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were what he sought!”(Hawthorne 121) Just like a leech Chillingworth is feeding on Dimmesdale, sucking the life out of him as he tries to dig deeper into Dimmesdale’s secrets all the while he is slowly killing him. Yet again the question to ask is why a leech? Why not any other blood sucking parasite that feeds on the host? One answer is that Leeches uses an anticoagulant that allows it to feed on the host without their knowledge. This resembles Dimmesdale when the author writes “ Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”(Hawthorne 122) Say that because dimmesdale trusted no one Chillingworth was able to harm dimmesdale right under his