Scarlet Letter

            In The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne creates a story where every emotion is shown. The story shows who the characters really are and what they are all about. In the song A Praise Chorus the band Jimmy Eat World expresses many feelings that the four main characters in the book have. Both the story and the song show the pain, guilt, wondering, and love Hester, Pearl, Chillingworth, and Dimmesdale feel.
             The book The Scarlet Letter shows the consequences of peoples actions and how everything does not work out the way one has planed. In the song A Praise Chorus the beginning lines express what Hester and Dimmesdale are feeling and maybe asking themselves. Jimmy Eat World says, "Are you gonna waste your time thinkin' how you've grown up or how you missed out? Things are never gonna be the way you want. Where's it gonna get you acting serious? Things are never gonna be quite what you want."" Those few lines are so true and for both Rev. Dimmesdale and Hester, they explain their lives in Boston since they met one another. Hester has to change herself when she gives birth to Pearl, she has to be ready for the consequences of what she has done. Hester loses her childhood dreams of what life should be. The quote from the book that best describes the song and Hester is, "But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness . The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,""stern and wild ones,""and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss."" Dimmesdale cannot tell the Puritan community he is the father of Pearl, which causes him to become ill and never get what he truly wants.