The narrator fears becoming like the dreary, corrupt, elderly men he works with on a daily basis. He isn't satisfied in his current position either, finding the work numbing. He sees the official life as "tedious" and longs to be a writer, even though he also fears that writing is a frivolous pastime. He honors his puritan heritage and the puritans did not value such storytelling.
However, the narrator feels a kinship with Hester Prynne and wants to tell her story in his own way. Like her, he is an outsider in his own culture and place. He wants more out of life than the other people around him do. So, by telling her story, we can expect he too is experiencing a kind of catharsis through storytelling.
The narrator fears that remaining in his job at the Custom House for any length of time would affect his long-term cognitive...
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well-being negatively.
In the introduction, we learn that the narrator has been a surveyor of the Salem Custom House for three years. He laments that these three years have been spent in pointless pursuits to meet the terms of his employment.
He finds neither pleasure in his work nor the company of his colleagues. The majority of them are "a set of wearisome old souls" who seem to have gleaned little wisdom from their life. The narrator is fearful that, if he stays in his position permanently, he will become as intellectually stunted as the Inspector of the Custom House, who possesses "no power of thought, no depth of feeling, [and] no troublesome sensibilities . . ."
The narrator tells us that he is used to vigorous intellectual discourse with the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. Thus, the thought of spending the rest of his life "as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade" is deeply distressing to him. His definition of happiness is living a life that calls into service "the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities." In light of this, he feels that he must turn his attention to other pursuits that challenge his acumen and intellectual powers.
We are given this information towards the end of the somewhat baffling introduction to this excellent novel, which generations of students have stumbled over in their eagerness to get to the far more readable story of Hester Prynne and the mystery of the scarlet letter.
The narrator, having taken his post in the Custom House to escape his more Romantic fancies and to apply parts of his intellect that he had not engaged before, finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with his lot:
To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension... it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this venerable friend - to make the dinner hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities!
There we have it - for a character like the narrator, who is a creative, imaginative being at heart and has written before, the idea of being "locked" into this dreary career and living out the rest of his days like "an old dog" is anathema to him. Fortunately, however, Providence had other ideas, and so we are presented with the fascinating narrative of Hester Prynne.