The Ambitious Guest

On the surface, “The Ambitious Guest” is a tragic short story about the death of a kind family and an aspiring young man who takes shelter with them one night. They are victims of a landslide, and their bodies are never found. The author uses irony and foreshadowing to underscore the characters’ dismal end. However, an allegorical reading of the text delves deeper to explore human beings’ hubristic and ultimately doomed efforts to triumph over nature. In this context, the mountain setting becomes a symbol of fate; it is an apathetic and powerful entity that dooms the characters at the end of the story. Hawthorne’s use of personification further emphasizes the mountain as a powerful figure and gives nature a sense of agency. Ultimately, the titular character’s pride is no match for nature’s might. The story emphasizes the age-old conflicts of Ambition Versus Fate and Human Beings Versus Nature.

On another level, “The Ambitious Guest” can be read as a story that highlights the struggle of accepting death as the final, common destiny of all human beings. The guest suggests that he can control death by claiming that he is willing to die only after he has accomplished his aims. Even the grandmother, who accepts that she will die soon, has particular desires regarding her burial. However, the landslide ensures that she perishes on fate’s terms rather than her own. Like the guest’s ambition, the grandmother’s wish shows the futility of The Desire to Conquer Death.

One of the most striking features of “The Ambitious Guest” is the lack of names. The narrator refers to the characters with general titles, such as “the father,” “the mother,” and “the stranger” (the titular guest). This lack of specificity lends the text and the characters a sense of universality; the father could be any father, while the stranger could be any stranger. Any reader could be one of the characters, making the story’s moral implications more urgent; no one can subvert fate, regardless of how ambitious, hardworking, or prepared they are. By encouraging the reader to identify with the characters, the text works as a cautionary tale against being obsessed with ambition or being too prideful.

This theme of hubris, or excessive self-confidence and pride, is explored through the figures of the guest and the father. Just as the father is overly confident in the shelter and ignores nature’s warning signs, the guest is too arrogant about his future. The guest believes that he is destined for greatness simply because he hopes for it. In the resolution, the narrator cautions the reader against following in the guest’s footsteps by asking, “Whose was the agony of that death-moment?” (307). This implies that the guest’s hubris leads him to feel greater agony than the other doomed characters because he realizes that he will never attain his lofty ambitions.

On the surface, “The Ambitious Guest” does not have the same narrative structure and overtly Dark Romantic themes, such as obsessiveness, human flaws, and sin, that many of Hawthorne’s other short stories such as “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Birth-Mark” have. However, an allegorical understanding of the text reveals different layers of meaning and moral struggle in the text. The struggle between human flaws and accepting natural laws and limitations is one of the most prominent aspects of Dark Romanticism, and the characters’ ambition and defiance of natural laws ultimately lead to their demise.