Scarlet Letter Essay -

The Scarlet Letter

It is six in the morning at an Arizona prison.   A prisoner named Jonas has been awoken by the prison bell, which sounds more like a horn, and signals that it is time for the prisoners to awake.   Jonas quickly gets up, makes his bed and then stands at the door of his cell awaiting a prison guard who will be doing the daily check of his cell.   While waiting for the guard, Jonas thinks to himself about what his day will be like, but he soon realizes that it will be the same as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and so on.   Jonas then grows quickly depressed, for he realizes, as he always does, that his life is filled with repetition and he is trapped by it.   Like Jonas, many characters in the novel, The Scarlet Letter, experience the feeling of being caught in one way or another .   Among those characters are Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, Pearl Prynne and Hester Prynne.   These characters are truly affected by entrapment.  

From beginning to end, many factors contribute to making Mr. Dimmesdale feel trapped in one way or another.   To start, he is trapped in silence and pain.   His need to be silent and the pain that he feels because of it, is shown when he says to Hester Prynne, in front of the town,
  Hester Prynne, ... I charge thee to speak out the name of thy   fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer!   Be not silent from any mistaken   pity   and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he   were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee  
  on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a   guilty heart through life.   What can thy silence do for him , except   it tempt him-yea, compel him, as it were-to add hyprocisy to sin?     Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou   mayest work out an open triumph over evil within thee, and the   sorrow without.   Take heed how thou deniest to him-who   perchance, hath...