Wakefield Essay -- Literary Analysis, Hawthorne

What Was He Thinking?What would you hark back of a man who left his family, moved over to the next roadway to watch their lives unfold, and then returned after twenty years as if energy had happened? What could drive a man to such bizarre behavior? These be the issues that Nathaniel Hawthorne deals with in the fiction of Mr. Wakefield. The very idea that a man could peradventure do such a thing makes the earreach want to examine his intentions. It is hard for a modern audience to make sense of such a tier because television shows and movies have made todays society focus so much on easily obvious themes or morals. Hawthorne used this story to examine societys motivations. In his short story Wakefield, it is necessary that Hawthorne uses the narrator as a shit to shed light on Mr. Wakefields motives as well as to emphasize the storys theme, that an individual can only hold dear and understand his life by looking in on it from the outside.In Hawthornes Wakefield the narra tors thoughts and comments bring insight into the motivations of the character of the story. The story includes a long introduction in which the narrator, Hawthorne, describes how he heard the meddlesome story of Mr. Wakefield. Hawthorne supplies his audience with a condensed version of the entire plot of the story. With this introduction, Hawthorne has al meditatey informed the audience of the storys intrigue plot and this intensifies the audiences desire to grow out Mr. Wakefields motivations because they cannot comprehend wherefore he would do such a thing. The audience will crusade to make sense of Mr. Wakefields actions, unless they will not find a logical explanation. The story may seem unreal but the reader must take the story as it is and focus on the charact... ..., would argue that Hawthorne was showing his modernism by writing about the unknown habits of human nature. Others, such as Morsberger would argue that the story of Wakefield simply mirrors some(prenomina l) of Hawthornes other works. I do not disagree with each viewpoint, but I feel that Hawthorne simply wanted to create an intriguing story that dealt with peoples motivations. I would argue that he wrote this story to examine a side of human nature that is often disregarded or intentionally left out of a large put of literature. Hawthorne is able to place the reader within the mind of Mr. Wakefield through his queer approach to story-telling. The result is a fascinating look into the mind of a very interesting character. Hawthorne has done such a wonderful romp of luring in the reader that it takes only a few minutes to read Wakefield, but you will never forget it.