cursed thing must there be buried!”, (131). He will not, however, come clean, because if he were to confess he would be treated the same as Hester and would not be able to be in a position to help others in their crises. The truth that will free him from his own prison, therefore, cannot be uttered. It is this hypocrisy that eventually leads to his character’s demise.One can infer, then, that the underlying moral of the story is truth. It is a noble thing to be honest, yet, as Oscar Wilde stated, “Truth is rarely pure, and never simple”. Truth goes hand-in-hand with hypocrisy, which Hawthorne uses throughout the novel through his characters, symbols, and ironies in order to show the importance of truth-not only to oneself, but to the world as well. It is sometimes the most painful, dreadful thing in the world to have to be honest, and yet ultimately, only the truth will set us free. The characters in The Scarlet Letter are not so unlike us in their actions, for it is only human to lie, and it is only human to hold double standards when taking our own sins into account. We should take this novel not as one lesson, but two: that our sins are not so small or great as to be perceived less or more harshly than those of others; and to, above all else, be true. ...
