Isolation In The Scarlet Letter

While studying works such as The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I found a sense of isolation directed towards the main characters. These authors often however tend use this method of isolation as a direct focus on the protagonist that without it, the reader would miss. My purpose of this paper is to bring more attention to this connection of isolation between The Scarlet Letter and The Road.

To attain this purpose I have made my paper into two sections with four sub-sections. In the first section I explain the purpose of isolation in The Road, followed by two sub-sections to give specifics and recurrent interests. In the second section I explain the purpose of isolation in The Scarlet Letter, followed …show more content…
The boy late in the novel is recovering from an illness and the man asks him a series of questions, concerned that the boy’s fever may have has lasting negative effects. The boy responds in frustration, “I’m not a retard.” The boy is choosing to not isolate himself as a “retard.” After the boy recovers from this illness, he and his father are robbed of everything they have possessed. Once they find the thief, the man makes him take off all of his clothes, and remove his shoes while holding him at gunpoint, while this is happening the boy is pleading with his father to help the stranger; the father responds with, “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.” The boy answer’s with/ “Yes, I am…I am the one.” In this quote the boy is showing isolation from his father. He is forming his own values and chooses to help other survivors, while his father chooses to stay isolated in order to attain …show more content…
After the protagonist, Hester Prynne, commits adultery, she is forced by her community to forever wear a red A on her clothing. “Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might reckoned a journey of some length’ got, haughty as her demeanor was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had flung in the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” In this quote the entire town has turned out to see Hester walking through the streets like a criminal. Hester, surrounded by people, is completely alone. This is totally isolation. “On the outskirts of town, within the verge of peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It has been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while comparative remoteness put it out of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills toward the west.” Due to Hester’s mistakes, Pearl and herself on the “outskirts” of town, therefore Hester is not the only one isolated; her daughter Pearl is