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Summary Of The Scarlet Letter And The Other Wes Moore

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One of the oldest and most approved psychological theories is empiricism, or the belief that knowledge stems from our experiences. According to John Locke, a prominent empiricist, “no man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience”. This concept often transpires into normal life, demonstrated throughout the two novels, The Other Wes Moore and The Scarlet Letter. In The Other Wes Moore, the author describes the narrative of himself and a man with the same name whose similarities go further than their names. Although the author overcame his turbulent childhood growing up in the ghetto of Baltimore, the other Wes’s fate was a prison sentence for murder of a police officer. Similarly, in the Scarlet Letter, the protagonist, Hester Prynne conquered the punishment that came as a result of her adultery and rebuilt her life as an independent woman. However, the counterpart to her sin, Arthur Dimmesdale, was crushed under the overwhelming guilt, and succumbed to physical and mental infliction. Throughout The Scarlet Letter and The Other Wes Moore, the authors utilize tone and diction in order to convey the idea that one’s experiences can either make them stronger or overpower them. In the novel, The Other Wes Moore, diction and tone are consistently utilized in order to reinforce the idea that one’s future is a result of their experiences and either eventually strengthen or weaken them. This novel details the narratives of two men throughout their childhoods, which were
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