Major Molineux

4 Pages 1004 Words

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “ These times, they are changing,” a symbolic message, echoes in the form of a relationship between the self and the world of a reality created by the eyes of the beholder. This reality of perception, manifested by the individual, is constantly evolving through experience, self-enlightenment, and the acquiring of knowledge. The poet and author Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrates these natural truths in the outward appearance of a short story titled “ My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”
Within the contents of this tale, a young lad named Robin sets off from his home in the country, on a journey to the little metropolis of a New England colony in search of his uncle Major Molineux. Robin’s intentions are to fulfill a past year’s promise given by his affluent uncle to come and live with him in the city. With a scant amount of wages given to him by his father, and the tattered articles of clothing on his back, this youth optimistically ventures on the road of self-discovery. Through several encounters with the local inhabitance, Robin’s black and white perceptions of the world around him, begin to blend into gray, as he starts to question the very basis of his understanding, stemming from what his uncle had told him just one year earlier. This transition involves the abandoning of the preset notions of adolescence in exchange for the knowledge that one gains through their own experiences. In Robin’s case, these experiences open his eyes to what kind of man !
his uncle really is.
Delving further into the inquisition of these natural truths, one must examine their underlying effects on the central characters of the story to understand how the changes of one’s reality are at a constant rate. The character of Major Molineux represents an ego trapped within a self-indulged idealism. He refuses to adaptively change to the world around him, maintaining an out of date mode of thinking. At ...