This Nathaniel Hawthorne story opens with a newspaper account of a man who ‘disappeared’ after telling his wife he was going on a week’s holiday, stalked her for twenty years, and then returned home as if nothing had happened. The narrator speculates that the man’s ‘holiday’ may have been a cruel joke to see how his wife would cope without him, and that he gradually became so enamoured with the isolated, clandestine existence that he found it difficult to return home to his former life. Themes include singularity, alienation and isolation, resilience (the wife’s life goes on), obsession, insignificance.
An important message of the story is that one’s place in the universe is not defined by ‘being’, but rather by what one does and the relationships you have with others.
Original Text / PDF / Audio (3,450 words)