signed the black man’s book in the forest with his blood. He runs into a

woman known as the town witch, and she tells him the next time he wants to

go into the forest she would go with him. When he arrives home, Mr.

Chillingworth comes into his room, and the Reverend refuses to take anymore

of his medicine. He sits at his desk and reworks the sermon he had planned

for the following celebration.

Chapter 21: A public holiday because of the election was planned and

everyone from that and the neighboring towns attended in their best

clothing. Hester and little Pearl attended but stayed slightly apart from

the crowd. Though everyone was packed close to see the parade, there was

an empty circle around Hester because of her scarlet letter. She had gone

previously to make plans with the captain of the ship that they were going

to take to England, and she saw the captain of that vessel talking to Roger

Chillingworth. The captain then came over to her and informed her that the

physician would be attending the voyage with them. She looked towards him,

and he smiled at her evilly.

Chapter 22: The parade began and Pearl saw the minister when he reached the

front. She asked if that was the same minister who kissed her in the

woods, and Hester told her to not talk about it in the marketplace.

Mistress Hibbins approached her and began talking to Hester about the

minister. Hester denied any involvement with him, and they began watching

as he preached to the people. Pearl left her mother and wandered around.

The captain of the ship told Pearl to give her mother a message for him.

She told him that her father was the Prince of Air. She threatened him and

ran to her mother. Hester’s mind wandered and thought about how she would

soon be free of he scarlet letter and the pain associated with it.

Chapter 23: The minister ended his incredible speech and it was one of the

best of his life. The people were inspired and as the parade turned

therefor, everyone would exit. The minister looked exceptionally sick and

called to Hester and Pearl to come to him. Roger Chillingworth ran towards

and tried to get Hester back from the minister. He is dying and with his

last breaths he shouts his sin to the audience around and blesses Hester

and Pearl. He tells the people to take another better look at Hester and

at himself so they see the truth in them. He ripped off the ministerial

band from his chest, and the people stood shocked. The people are struck

with awe and sympathy. The doctor came over the minister, awestruck

because he will lose him and his revenge. Dimmesdale asks Pearl for a kiss

and she finally places one on his lips. Hester kneels over him and asks

him if they will not see each other again, and spend eternity together.

The reverend tells her that their sin was too large, and that is all she

should be concerned. He shouted farewell to the audience and breathed his

last breath.

Chapter 24: People swore after that day that when they saw the minister rip

off the band on his breast that a scarlet ‘A’ resided there. Many thought

that he made the revelation in the dying hour so everyone would know that

one who appeared so pure, was as much a sinner as the rest of them. Roger

Chillingworth died within the year and bequeathed large amounts of property

both in New England and in England to Pearl. This made Pearl the richest

heiress in the New World. Soon after his death, Hester Prynne and her

little Pearl disappeared. Years later Hester came back alone to live with

her sin in her cottage. Pearl was thought to be happily married elsewhere

and mindful of her mother. After her return, many people of the town went

to Hester for advice and help when they were in need. After many years she

died, and was placed next to the saintly minister. They shared a tombstone

and they would be together forever.

Character Profiles

Hester Prynne: A beautiful puritan woman full of strong passions, Hester

Prynne is the main character in the story. Employed as the village

seamstress, she is strong and caring, helping anyone she can when he or she

are in need. With a penitent heart, Hester travels through the story

becoming only a shadow of her former passionate loving self. Other than

the scarlet letter, she was a very moral woman whose only joy in life was

her daughter Pearl. Roger Chillingsworth: The missing husband of Hester

Prynne. He shows up the day that Hester is put on public display and does

not show himself as her husband. A scholar and a man of medicine, his soul

purpose in his life becomes revenge against the man who helped his wife

sin. By the end of the story, he is shown to be an evil character.

Pearl: Looked on as the devil’s child, Pearl is the only one in the story

that is purely innocent. She is passionate, intelligent, and energetic.

Pearl is in touch with nature and with her mother’s feelings. Ever since

she was born, Pearl had a fascination with the scarlet letter that is a

constant reminder for Hester of her sin.

Arthur Dimmesdale: The minister of the town that the people adore, Arthur

was the secret lover of Hester Prynne. He was a sickly man who took his

sin very seriously. He spent the seven years since his indiscretion with

Mistress Prynne trying to repent. He wore down his body with his penitence

and his sin ate away his soul. In the end, he frees himself from his guilt

by admitting to everyone his sin.

Metaphor Analysis

The Rose Bush: A rose bush that grew outside the prison was a symbol of

survival, that there is life after the prison where Hester spent he

beginning of the story.

The Scarlet Letter ‘A’: The letter that Hester was forced to wear upon her

bosom, the scarlet letter was not only a symbol of her adulterous sin, but

of the women herself. The letter masks her beauty and passion as the story

goes until it is what she is known.

The Black Man in the Woods: the peoples symbol for the devil. The woods in

those times were a very scary place, and they thought that people that went

into it came out evil and corrupted.

Theme Analysis

The Scarlet Letter is a story that illustrates intricate pieces of the

Puritan lifestyle. Centered first on a sin committed by Hester Prynne and

her secret lover before the story ever begins, the novel details how sin

affects the lives of the people involved. For Hester, the sin forces her

into isolation from society and even from herself. Her qualities that

Hawthorne describes at the opening of the book, i.e. her beauty, womanly

qualities, and passion are, after a time, eclipsed by the ‘A’ she is forced

to wear. An example of this is her hair. Long hair is something in this

time period that is a symbol of a woman. At the beginning of the story,

Hawthorne tells of Hester’s long flowing hair. After she wears the scarlet

letter for a time, he paints a picture of her with her hair out of site

under a cap, and all the wanton womanliness gone from her.

Yet, even with her true eclipsed behind the letter, of the three main

characters affected, Hester has the easiest time because her sin is out in

the open. More than a tale of sin, the Scarlet Letter is also an intense

love story that shows itself in the forest scene between Hester and the

minister Arthur Dimmesdale. With plans to run away with each, Arthur and

Hester show that their love has surpassed distance and time away from each

other. This love also explains why Hester would not reveal the identity of

her fellow sinner when asked on the scaffolding. Roger Chillingworth is

the most affected by the sin, though he was not around when the sin took

place. Demented by his thoughts of revenge and hate, Hawthorne shows Mr.

Chillingworth to be a devil or as a man with an evil nature. He himself

commits one of the seven deadly sins with his wrath.

By the end of the tale that surpasses seven years, Hester is respected and

revered by the community as a doer of good works, and the minister is

worshipped for his service in the church. Only Mr. Chillingworth is looked

upon badly by the townspeople although no one knows why. Through it all,

Hawthorne illustrates that even sin can produce purity, and that purity

came in the form of the sprightly Pearl. Though she is isolated with her

mother, Pearl finds her company and joy in the nature that surrounds her.

She alone knows that her mother must keep the scarlet letter on her at all

times, and that to take it off is wrong.

Through the book the child is also constantly asking the minister to

confess his sin to the people of the town inherently knowing that it will

ease his pain. Hawthorne’s metaphor of the rose growing next to the prison

is a good metaphor for Pearl’s life that began in that very place. The

reader sees this connection when Pearl tells the minister that her mother

plucked her from the rose bush outside of the prison. Finally, for all the

characters, Hawthorne’s novel illustrates how one sin can escalate to

encompass one’s self so that the true humans behind the sin are lost. This

is what makes Hawthorne’s novel not only a story of love vs. hate, sin vs.

purity, good vs. evil, but all of these combined to make a strikingly

historical tragedy as well.

Top Ten Quotes

1) «It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that

may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of

human frailty and sorrow.» 2) « ‘People say,’ said another, ‘that the

Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to

his heart that such a scandal has come upon his congregation.’» 3) « ‘If

thou feelest to be for thy soul’s peace, and that they earthly punishment

will there by be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak

out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer.’» 4) «But she named

the infant ‘Pearl,’ as being of great price- purchased with all she had-

her mother’s only pleasure.» 5) «After putting her fingers in her mouth,

with many ungrateful refusals to answer Mr. Wilson’s question, the child

finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked

by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison door» 6) «

‘He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Mr. Dimmesdale, in the hot

passion of his heart!’» 7) «Such helpfulness was found in her- so much

power to do and power to sympathize- that many people refused to interpret

the scarlet ‘A’ by it’s original signification. They said that it meant

‘Able’; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a women’s strength.» 8) «‘That

old man!- the physician!- the one whom they call Roger Chillingworth!-he

was my husband!’» 9) «Pacify her, if thou lovest me!» 10) « ‘Hester

Prynne’ cried he, with a piercing earnestness ‘in the name of Him, so

terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do

what- for my own heavy sin and miserable agony- I withheld myself from

doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me!»

Slaughterhouse Five

Chapter One. Summary:

The narrator assures us that the book we are about to read is true, more or

less. The parts dealing with World War II are most faithful to actual

events. Twenty-three years have passed since the end of the war, and for

much of that time the narrator has been trying to write about the bombing

of Dresden. He was never able to bring make the project work. When he

thinks about Dresden's place in his memory, he always recalls two things:

an obscene limerick about a man whose penis has let him down, and "My Name

is Yon Yonson," a song which has no ending.

Late some nights, the narrator gets drunk and begins to track down old

friends with the telephone. Some years ago he tracked down Bernard O'Hare,

an old war buddy of his, using Bell Atlantic phone operators. When he

tracked his old friend down, he asked if Bernard would help him remember

things about the war. Bernard seemed unenthusiastic. When the narrator

suggests the execution of Edgar Derby, an American who stole a teapot from

the ruins, as the climax of the novel, Bernard still seems unenthusiastic.

The best outline the narrator ever made for his Dresden book was on a roll

of toilet paper, using crayon. Colors represented different people, and the

lines crisscrossed when people met, and ended when they died. The outline

ended with the exchange of prisoners who had been liberated by Americans

and Russians.

After the war, the narrator went home, married, and had kids, all of whom

are grown now. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, and in

anthropology he learned that "there was absolutely no difference between

anybody," and that "nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting." He's

worked various jobs, and tried to keep up work on his Dresden novel all

this time.

He actually did go to see Bernard O'Hare just a few weeks after finding him

over the telephone. He brought his young daughters, who were sent upstairs

to play with O'Hare's kids. The men could not think of any particularly

good memories or stories, and the narrator noticed that Mary, Bernard's

wife (to whom Slaughterhouse Five is dedicated), seemed very angry about

something. Finally, she confronted him: the narrator and Bernard were just

babies when they fought. Mary was angry because if the narrator wrote a

book, he would make himself and Bernard tough men, glorifying war and

turning scared babies into heroes. The movie adaptation would then star

"Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving,

dirty old men" (14). Wars would look good, and we would be sure to have

more of them. The narrator promised that it won't be that kind of book, and

that he'd call it The Children's Crusade. He and Mary were friends starting

at that moment. That night, he and Bernard looked through Bernard's library

for information on the real Children's Crusade, a war slightly more sordid

than the other crusades. The scheme was cooked up by two monks who planned

to raise an army of European children and then sell them into slavery in

North Africa. Sleepless later that night, the narrator looked at a history

of Dresden published in 1908. The book described a Prussian siege of the

city in the eighteenth century.

In 1967, the narrator and O'Hare returned to Dresden. On the flight over,

the narrator got stuck in Boston due to delays. In a hotel in Boston, he

felt that someone had played with all the clocks. With every twitch of a

clock, it seemed that years passed. That night, he read a book by Roethke

and another book by Erika Ostrovsky. The Ostrovsky book, Céline and His

Vision, is a story of a French soldier whose skull gets cracked during

World War I. He hears noises and suffers from insomnia forever afterward,

and at night he writes grotesque, macabre novels. Céline sees death and the

passage of time as the same process.

The narrator also read about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the

hotel room's Gideon Bible. He calls attention to the moment when Lot's wife

looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. He loves her for that act,

because it was such a human thing to do.

Now, he presents us with his war book. He will strive to look back no more.

This book, he says, is a failure. It was bound to be a failure because it

was written by a pillar of salt. He gives us the first line and the last,

and the central story of the novel is ready to begin.

Chapter Two. Summary:

"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." He wanders from moment to moment

in his life, experiencing chronologically disparate events right after one

another. He sees his birth and death and everything in between, all out of

order, with no pattern to predict what will come next. Or so he believes.

Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York. Tall, thin, and embarrassingly

weak, he made an unlikely soldier. He was going to night school in

optometry when he got drafted to fight in World War II. His father died in

a hunting accident before Billy left for Europe. The Germans captured Billy

during the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945 he returned to the States, finished

optometry school, and married the daughter of the school's owner. During

the engagement, he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. After his

release, he finished school, married the girl, got his own practice with

help from his father-in-law, became quite rich, and had two kids. In 1968

he was the sole survivor of a plane crash. While he was in the hospital,

his wife died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He returned home for rest, but

without warning one day he went to New York and claimed on the radio that

he had been kidnapped by aliens called Trafalmadorians. Billy's daughter,

Barbara, retrieved him from New York. A month later, Billy wrote a letter

to Ilium's newspaper describing the aliens. The Trafalmadorians are shaped

like two-foot tall toilet plungers, suction cup down.

We now see Billy working on a second letter describing the Trafalmadorian

conception of time. All time happens simultaneously, so a man who dies is

actually still alive, since all moments exist at all times. Billy works on

his letter, oblivious to the increasingly frantic shouts of his daughter,

who has stopped by to check on him. The burden of caring for Billy has made

Barbara difficult and unforgiving.

We move to the first time Billy gets unstuck in time. Billy receives

minimal training as a chaplain's assistant before being shipped to Europe.

He arrives in September of 1944, right in the middle of the Battle of the

Bulge. He never meets his chaplain or gets a proper helmet or boots.

Although he survives the onslaught, he wanders behind German lines, tagging

along with two scouts and an anti-tank gunner named Roland Weary. Weary

repeatedly saves Billy's life, mostly by not allowing him to lie down in

the snow and die. Although the scouts are experienced, Weary is as new to

the war as Billy is; he just fancies himself as having more of a taste for

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