The Tragedy of Death in Hawthorne’s “The Ambitious Guest”

When writing “The Ambitious Guest” Nathaniel Hawthorne follows a complex course through characterization, an awful catastrophe, and an ironic ending to express sentiments about death and how it is seen by society. Hawthorne wants the reader to see that death occurs all the time, even when we do not know it. However this does not make it any less tragic, and in fact, may make it more so. In this short story, Hawthorne portrays a lonely mountain family who discovers the spirit of an ambitious traveler, and is then caught in a catastrophic landslide that destroys them all. He uses the family as a practical comparison for his message about death, and he uses the traveler to portray this message. The family’s story is a conceivable one, and one that actually did occur. However, this does not change the message of the story. The traveler is what brings out this message, which is obvious through the inquiry in the last paragraph, and it is this inquiry that brings final meaning to the characterization, and the appalling incident.
Hawthorne opens his story by giving personality to both the family and the traveler so that the reader can relate to them and, eventually, begin to care for them. He writes that “[t]he faces of the father and mother had a sober gladness; the children laughed; the eldest daughter was the image of Happiness at seventeen; and the aged grandmother, […], was the image of Happiness grown old” (Hawthorne 237). Here he portrays an ideal family; a caring father and mother, a number of children, and an elderly grandmother. With this personality also comes the emphasis of another characteristic … mortality. Hawthorne is said to be stressing the “familiar […] lesson, [that] man is mortal” through the false alert of a slide early on in the story (Sears). The brief false alert puts the suggestion of