Ethan Brand

“Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with charcoal, sat watching his kiln at nightfall, while his little son played at building houses with the scattered fragments of marble, when, on the hill-side below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of the forest.”

Ethan Brand’s unsettling laugh disturbs Bartram and Joe’s peaceful work at the lime-kiln. The narrator uses a simile to compare the laughter to wind, and imagery to evoke the unsettling sound’s effect on the landscape. The laugh also illustrates Ethan Brand’s loneliness in his self-imposed isolation, supporting the themes of Spiritual Damnation and Pride and The Loneliness of Social Detachment and Rejection.

“The kiln […] on the mountain-side, stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its furnace, and melted them, as it were, into the one thought that took possession of his life. […] With the smoke and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this door, which seemed to give admittance into the hill-side, it resembled nothing so much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains were accustomed to show to pilgrims.”

The narrator uses imagery to describe the lonely lime-kiln near the mountain where Ethan Brand’s obsession with the Unpardonable Sin began. Comparing the lime-kiln to the opening of hell immediately establishes the hellfire symbolism and two of the story’s core themes: The Dangers of Amoral Intellectualism and Spiritual Damnation and Pride. Hawthorne’s imagery suggests that the protagonist’s sin took form and grew in the flames of the furnace.

“‘You offer me a rough welcome,’ said a gloomy voice, as the unknown man drew nigh. ‘Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at my own fireside.’”

Ethan Brand’s first line of dialogue reveals his refusal to accept the kindness or friendship of others, introducing the theme of The Loneliness of Social Detachment and Rejection. In his first words to