Student Question
What technique did the writer use in "The Ambitious Guest?"
Quick answer:
The writer uses allegory and parable techniques to convey moral lessons in "The Ambitious Guest." Through the story, Hawthorne illustrates the dangers of ambition overshadowing contentment and happiness. The paradox of the family leaving their safe home for impending doom underscores the moral. Additionally, Gothic elements are present, as the stranger's arrival coincides with ominous weather and a rockslide that becomes the family's grave, enhancing the story's tension and theme.
"The Ambitious Guest" is an allegory,(n)a short moral story (often with animal characters), where Hawthorne suggests that once the simple family is overtaken by ambition and lose all that makes their life happy and content by wishing for grandeur and fame, they lose all meaning in their life. It is also much like a parable, a Biblical story with a moral, that teaches much the same thing: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it. What is paradoxical is that the family leaves the shelter of their cozy home to rush to their own death. There is also an element of the Gothic in this tale as Hawthorne weaves the stranger (the ambitious guest) into the tale with the threatening weather and the sliding of the rock, which makes the graves for the entire family!
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