life.  Although themother is cautious, and gives warning about the direction in which the conversation is going, the father expresses his own ambition, a long-held wish for "a good farm", and to be able "to stand well with (his) neighbors and be called Squire".  He hopes that he dies peacefully in his bed, and wants a simple monument at his death, something to let people know that (he) lived an honest man and died a Christian".  The old grandmother reveals a deep preoccupation with superstition, instilled in her youth; she wants to be able to be sure that when she dies her appearance is in order, and asks that a mirror be held over her face after she has passed away so that she might be able to make sure she looks all right.  The eldest daughter, like her mother, makes a cautionary remark about the virtue of being content with what one has been given, but she also remarks that she feels "lonesome", unconsciously hinting at her own innocent but hidden desires for something more.  The younger children are exhuberant, adventurous, and imaginative, as illustrated by the one child's banter about visiting "the basin of the Flume, a brook which tumbles, over (a) precipice, deep within the Notch".

There are only sketchy descriptions of the family that lives in the cottage where the "ambitious guest" stops.

There is the father, who owns "a primitive tavern." After listening to the "frank-hearted stranger," the father begins to wish that his family had a prosperous farm. He would like to be called Squire by his neighbors, as well. His wife, Esther, teases him about his dream of a farm, saying that he wants this when he becomes a widower. Then, one of at least three small boys in the family leaves the bedroom and tells his mother that he wishes that all of them could go with the stranger to the Flume and drink from the Basin. The oldest girl among at least two others, who is seventeen and described by the narrator as a "mountain nymph," says that she feels a bit lonesome this night.

Perhaps the most descriptive passage of those living in the cottage is one in which the family watches the fireplace after hearing "a wail along the road":

There were the little faces of the children, peeping from their bed apart, and here the father's frame of strength, the mother's subdued and careful mien,...the budding girl, and the good old granddam, [the husband's mother] still knitting in the warmest place.

It is important to note that in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, character traits are only significant if they represent some inner reality. For this reason, then, the description of the family that lives in the Notch is fairly sketchy since the members seem to be representative of individuals who do not develop their curiosities. The cottage dwellers are described only as having,

a consciousness of unity among themselves, and separation from the world at large.

Still, the exposition of "The Ambitious Guest" introduces the reader to the cottage dwellers who, though non-travelers themselves, have occasion to at least "have daily converse with the world." Since the stagecoach that runs between the Green Mountains of Maine on the one side and the "shores of the St. Lawrence" on the other stops at the cottage on the way, this family, who owns one of those "primitive taverns," has occasion to meet and converse with many different people. Such a situation seems to satisfy them.

It is not until the "frank-hearted stranger" arrives at their door that the family begins to think of another way of living. "One glance and smile" put this stranger on good terms with the eldest daughter who is seventeen. The father, the "master of the house," takes the stranger's knapsack for him. In this household of a least three younger brothers and one older one, the seventeen-year-old and at least two younger sisters, a father, a mother named Esther, and an old grandmother, there is warmth and contentment. It is not until the ambitious guest sows the seeds of curiosity about the world in the minds of his contented hosts that they put aside their complacency.

There is a father, a mother, the 17 year old daughter, and old grandmother, and a young traveler who shows up and makes himself at home with the family. There are other children as well.  None are given names.  It is told like a fable, so there are no names at all, just descriptions through actions and words.

The traveler begins by telling them of his ambition. He wants to make his mark in the world.  This talk gets the individual family members talking about their secret wishes as well. The father wants to rank higher in life than he does.  He wants more respect from others than he gets. The younger child of theirs wants to go "drink from the basin of the Flume" which is a dangerous spot out in the cold.  The grandmother wants them to hold a mirror above her when she is dead and in her casket so that she may see herself and make sure all is well before they bury her.

However, the mother and daughter have odd feelings about all of this ambition being discussed. The 17 year old girl thinks it best to just sit by the warm fire and be comfortable and content. The mother doesn't want her husband to get too ambitious.  She'd rather not lose him.  These are the characters and what they represent.

Interestingly, Hawthorne molds his characters of "The Ambitious Guest" quaintly, yet convincingly to his theme of the unexpectedness of death. In fact, some of them even speak of the mortality of his or her life.

• the "ambitious guest" - A wayfaring youth who stops at a cottage located in "the bleakest spot of all New England," he finds himself surrounded in "kindly warmth," especially in the eyes of the eldest daughter of the family. When the landlord asks him about his travels, the youth, who is warming himself at the fire, also finds warmth of feeling emanating from the family. So, he speaks freely of his yearning to make his mark in life. later observing: "It is our nature to desire a monument...in the universal heart of man."
• the father - After listening to the youth, the father resurrects some of his old yearnings: He speaks of his having wished for a prosperous farm, his rise to the position of Squire who has political position and power. Adding that he would like his family to be so proud and fond of him that they would greatly mourn his death and erect a gravestone with his name, age, and a Bilble verse or religious hymn upon it, he wishes that people would know that he "died a Christian." Ironically, when a wagon of two or three men are heard singing outdoors, the father does not lift the latch this time as he has done so readily for the "ambitious guest."
• the little boy - Having "caught the infection" from the fireside discussions, one of the children, a boy, wants everyone to go right away and take a drink from the basin of the "Flume," a stream that flows over the precipice of "the Notch" where the family lives. Because the father does not open the door to the wagon of men, the boy is disappointed, bemoaning, "They'd have given us a ride to the Flume."
• the eldest daughter - Having heard the celebration of the men in the wagon, the daughter expresses her loneliness. The guest asks her if may be allowed to put her feelings into words, but she refuses, declaring that then the feelings would not be hers; in truth, she is embarassed to express her new affection for the youth. She is, thus, reticent about her yearnings.
• the grandmother - Like the father, she, too, speaks of her death and the wishes for her burial. Explaining that she is haunted by an old superstition that if her burial clothes may not be put on her correctly with no ruff that is not smooth, or cap that is not set right upon the head, her corpse will be disturbed and will have to "put up its cold hands" under the earth and rearrange all that is imperfect.  So, she requests her family to put a mirror to her dead face in the chance that she will see that they have dressed her appropriately and she can rest in death.

In response to the words of the family, the guest, with profound dramatic irony, says,

"Young and old, we dream of graves and monuments....I wonder how mariners feel when the ship is sinking, and, they...are to be buried together in the ocean--that wide and nameless sepulcher?"

His words are prophetic as the cottagers hear the sound they have long dreaded. They rush to the shelter they have devised, but as fate would have it, the rock slide "broke into two branches" and goes around the cottage, now the empty monument of their lives, and they are swallowed into the "nameless sepulcher" of the avalanche of rock and snow from which their bodies are never recovered.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Ambitious Guest," the characters who live at the cottage all appear to be content with their lives at the beginning of the story. For the most part, the characters are unnamed. However, toward the end of the story, the Father calls his wife Esther. The characters consist of the Mother, the Father, the Grandmother, the eldest Daughter, the children, and the Ambitious Guest.

The family appears very happy with their simple life as they sit by the warm fire. Mother and Father wear an expression of "sober gladness" (paragraph 1). The children are portrayed as laughing while the eldest daughter, who is seventeen, is described as the "image of Happiness" (para 1). Even the grandmother is described as "Happiness grown old" (para 1). Even though the family lives in the remote Notch in the White Hills, they are satisfied with their existence.

However, the Ambitious Guest appears. He is a young man who seems sad. In fact, "his face at first wore the melancholy expression, almost despondency, of one who travels a wild and bleak road" (para 4). Upon meeting the family, he cheers up and shares his ambition as they all sit comfortably around the fire. The Guest's ambition is to be remembered for accomplishing something great after his death. The conversation then turns to members of the family sharing their own wishes, and the once content family becomes saddened through a discussion of death. Ironically, they all die when they leave the safety of the cottage, and the Ambitious Guest will never have his ambition fulfilled.

All of the characters in "The Ambitious Guest" include The Ambitious Guest himself, the mother, the father, the older daughter, the grandmother, and the younger children.

The greatest contrast in characterization is between The Ambitious Guest, and all other members of the family. The guest is described as being "frank hearted". He is open and exuberant. The rest of the family acts as a sounding board for the guest to talk about his ambitions in life. The family begins the conversation as fatalists. They take everything at face value. As the evening progresses, they are all inspired by the guest whose fantastic conversation causes them to question.

The family dwells in the Notch of the White Hills, which Hawthorne calls "the bleakest spot of all New England." Their home also serves as an inn.

It was one of those primitive taverns where the traveller pays only for food and lodging, but meets with a homely kindness beyond all price.

Anyone traveling through the Notch in either direction can stop and enter the house to get out of the cold wind, have something to eat or drink, and stay overnight if so inclined.

The stage-coach always drew up before the door of the cottage.

The passengers and the driver would undoubtedly want refreshments and a chance to stretch their legs and warm themselves at the fire. This could be a good source of income for the landlord.

The romantic pass of the Notch is a great artery, through which the life-blood of internal commerce is continually throbbing between Maine, on one side, and the Green Mountains and the shores of the St. Lawrence, on the other.

The Green Mountains run north and south through Vermont. The so-called ambitious guest is traveling south on foot. Evidently he could not afford to take the stage-coach. People did a lot of traveling on foot in Hawthorne's day. He wrote other stories in which pedestrians cover long distances, including "Young Goodman Brown" and "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux."

The young man enters because he wants warmth, food, and shelter for the night. He does not even knock but enters the cottage as he would any ordinary inn.

"Then you are going towards Vermont?" said the master of the house, as he helped to take a light knapsack off the young man's shoulders.

"Yes, to Burlington, and far enough beyond," replied he. I meant to have been at Ethan Crawford's to-night; but a pedestrian lingers along such a road as this. It is no matter; for, when I saw this good fire, and all your cheerful faces, I felt as if you had kindled it on purpose for me, and were waiting my arrival."

There is nothing ominous about this young man's arrival. The road is the main artery between Maine and Vermont. The guest never tells them why he is going to Burlington, but there is a strong probability that he is looking for work. A young man who lived in Maine would find little employment there and would be likely to travel south to find work in the growing manufacturing centers in Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York.

This cottage must have been a welcome sight because it is getting dark and there would be nowhere else to stay. Hawthorne mentions that the young man is wearing a knapsack. No doubt he has been sleeping by the side of the road and will continue doing so until he gets all the way to his destination.

Hawthorne indicates that it is nighttime by narrating:

"The younger children had been put to bed in another room, but with an open door between, so that they could be heard talking busily among themselves.

Henry James moved to England because he complained that America offered nothing to write about. Hawthorne was the first successful American freelance writer, and he did his best to extract material for  stories, novels and essays from the primitive scenes and humble folk of his native land.

It was a difficult task for a writer in Hawthorne’s time and place, because there was virtually nothing to emulate in contemporary American fiction. The popular fiction writers of his day were all Europeans. Americans were far more interested in the charms of an older culture than in the prosaic facts of their own existence.

The first thing to note about the guest is the obvious trait that he is ambitious. When he arrives at the house, he is weary but is immediately brightened by the warm response he gets from the family. The guest is described with a series of balanced characteristics: proud and gentle, haughty but a brother to the poor, and a man with dreams marked by loftiness and caution. 

The guest was also a loner, a solitary man with great ambition. 

The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty, that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway, -- though not, perhaps, while he was treading it. 

Up to this point, the ambitious guest has done nothing noteworthy but he is determined that he will not die until he has done something incredible, and this will establish his legacy. The guest's ambitious ruminations affect the usually contented family and they begin to speculate about more extravagant things in their own lives. The guest dreams of doing great things but also seems to insist on warranting a monument for himself. So, he has wandered alone while dreaming of greatness, which is admirable but it is also dubious because part of his motivation is the self-glorification of a monument and/or being remembered for greatness. 

The guest, as described by the author, is "of a proud, yet gentle spirit--haughty and reserved among the rich and great; but ever ready to stoop his head to the lowly cottage door, and be like a brother or a son at the poor man's fireside."  The author also tells us that the young man is motivated by ambition, to somehow be remembered for something important someday:

The secret of the young man's character was a high and abstracted ambition. He could have borne to live an undistinguished life, but not to be forgotten in the grave. Yearning desire had been transformed to hope; and hope, long cherished, had become like certainty, that, obscurely as he journeyed now, a glory was to beam on all his pathway,--though not, perhaps, while he was treading it.

As for what the young man wants when he comes upon the family's home, he says only that he is headed to Burlington, Vermont, and has not made it as far as he had hoped by nightfaull, for "a pedestrian lingers along a road such as this."