The Reality of Ethan Brands Unpardonable Sin :: Ethan Brand Essays

The Reality of Ethan Brands Unpardonable everywherestepThe relentless obsession of one man becomes the theme of Nathaniel Hawthornes haunting tale, Ethan Brand. A fluxing lime-burner by trade in the hills of Western Massachusetts, Brand passes the lonely hours of the dark staring into the intense flames of the kiln, contemplating the theological doctrine of the deadly blaze. What sin could be so totally evil that even the great God of promised land could not forgive? I remember as a child, listening to my set about, as he stood in the pulpit and expounded to his congregation the very alike(p) subject that had so totally mesmerized Hawthornes character, Ethan Brand. I remember the some questions I had about this horrible sin. What was it? Could I commit the unpardonable sin? Maybe I already had. That was the most disturbing of all. It seems that literary amateur R. P. Blackmur has experienced someaffair of the homogeneous when he writes I do not hunch forward how it may b e now, but when I was a boy the unpardonable sin, the unforgivable sin, or--as I was taught in church, the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost--was a major though intermittent attraction in the short time that seem so long just before sleep. It was a excite possibility that I might find what it was and how to do it the frightening thing was that I might then have to do it, as if denudation was actual commission of the sin. The verse in St. Mark (319) contained as oftentimes potential horror as anything I have ever read...so when I read Ethan Brand I knew where he was....(179). Since that time, I have interpreted my place in the pulpit of a church like my father before me. And on occasion, I too address the subject and regain the same questions that I, and others like me, pondered so long ago the very same question that haunts, possesses, and ultimately ruins Ethan Brand. Driven by his insatiable desire to exhibit the deep truth of this frightening possibility, Ethan Brand left his lonely lime kiln on a quest, a quest that would send him the world over in search of the unpardonable sin. For eighteen years he study and researched the idea that slowly took him over. When his search began, Brand was a kind and blue man concerned for the well-being of others. The narrator describes him as .