Compare And Contrast Scarlet Letter And Captain Ahab

The Scarlet Letter, written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is about the vengeance of a man after his ex-wife suffers for her sin in a small town in Boston whilst taking care of her daughter she bore after cheating on him with the town minister. Herman Melville wrote a similar American gothic novel titled Moby Dick, which is about a wildly obsessed captain seeking revenge and death on a gargantuan white whale along with his shipmates. The Character, Captain Ahab, was written after King Ahab in the Bible. In several ways, Roger Chillingworth and Captain Ahab are both evil characters with many similarities. A way both characters are similar is how they mistreated at least one person emotionally and physically. Roger started mistreating the man that was cheating on his ex-wife, Arthur, physically when he …show more content…
Seeing that the minister did not present himself on the scaffold, which was the sacred place to stand to be punished, he decided to make it his mission to torture Arthur for the rest of his life. This led him to sin and he became an evil physician planning to take revenge on another man who already felt guilty for his own sin. He was taking advantage on the fact that Arthur did not know he was the ex-husband of Hester. So when he was in pain, Roger would use his medicine to make the pain worse on him. Likewise, Captain Ahab and his obsession over Moby Dick led him away from being a good leader and taking care of his companions. His choices were worse because he neglected and didn’t care for the sake of his companions’ deaths. For example, when Pip almost died, he didn’t want to go back and look for him because it would be “wasting time” when he could be searching for the whale. Another example is when they met up with another captain that was in search of his son, but Ahab didn’t bother to go look for him, showing his abominable