entry three: characterization

In the start of the novel, Roger Chillingworth came to Boston to the Puritan society to rekindle with his wife Hester. Once he gets there, he finds out that Hester had an affair and had a bastard child. He speaks with Hester and he explains that, "we have wronged each other. Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay." Here he admits that he is part of the reason that Hester cheated on him, and he is part of the reason she sinned. Both of them had faults, and so his first wrongdoing lead to hers. He starts off by coming to town to take revenge on the man that had an affair with his wife Hester, however he is not taken over by it.  He is even somewhat (somewhat lol, not really but somewhat) understanding. 

Later in the novel, Chillingworth becomes overwhelmed and defined by his vengeance. As "calm, gentle, passionless as he appeared, there was ye, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a ore intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy." His entire being became getting revenge on the man that slept with his wife (Dimmesdale), and over the course of the novel, he changed from wanting revenge, to revenge defining him. He controlled the revenge in the beginning, hover after a while, the revenge controlled him. 

The thing that made this transformation and transition, was his need for revenge and the fact that he had nothing else in his life to focus on. Chillingworth "had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the dearest revenge!"  With the only thing keeping him alive, the only ting for him to live for, being revenge... that would make anybody go insane. And so Chillingworth fell into the trap of revenge- he took it too far, and  in the end, it effected him, more than the person he was seeking revenge on. 

So, overall, Chillingworth started off by simply getting revenge on a man, yet because of his lack of anything else to live for, he was consumed by it, and eventually was defined by the revenge.