or Satan's emissary."Chapter 11: The Interior of a Heart Chapter 12: The Minister's Vigil Summary These chapters describe Dimmesdale. Chillingworth is toying with the minister psychologically, making his revenge as terrible as possible. Dimmesdale, however, does not sense that Chillingworth is causing much of his suffering, though he suspects something is awry with the old leech. In this suffering, however, Dimmesdale delivers some of his most powerful sermons. After all, what made him a great minister was his ability to address "the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language." But, as the narrator tells us, he is limited by exactly that which makes him great: he is holy because he speaks the most evocatively about sin. He wants to confess to his parishioners, "I, your pastor, whom you reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!" He cannot bring himself to do so, however. As a result, his self-probing keeps him up at night, and he even sees visions. In one sequence, he sees Hester and "little Pearl in her scarlet garb" who points "her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her mother's bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast." The minister can tell that these visions are not real, of course, but because of the psychological tumult, true reality doesn't matter to him anymore. Even the Bible, what should be for any minister the one fixed point, has shrunk "to nothing within his grasp." In the middle of the night, Dimmesdale thinks of some remedy: holding a vigil on the scaffold where years before Hester suffered her shame. He screams in his pain and worries that everyone in the town will wake up and come to look at him. The narrator tells us, however, that townspeople took it for a witch's voice. As he is standing up on the scaffold, he starts to find the things that occur at groundlevel rather humorous. He almost laughs when he sees Wilson and thinks that he calls out the older minister. The older...
