Difficulty Paper #1

Difficulty Paper on The Scarlet Letter

            The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a very dark and intense book. I enjoy reading this book because it talks about the life and believes of the Puritan people and how they were easy to judge those who sinned, like Hester Prynne. Puritans were supposed to be good people so anybody who was involved in any immoral action was looked upon and agonized by everyone else, for instance how the townspeople harassed both Pearl and Hester. They also seemed to focus on Hester’s sin rather than to focus on their own. Just like this book grabs my attention, it confuses me a lot sometimes as well. The hardest thing for me is the Old English Nathaniel Hawthorne uses.

            The novel is written in Old English and although some of it is pretty easy to understand, there are other concepts that are harder to grasp. I noticed that throughout the novel instead of focusing on what was actually happening in the scenes I was concentrated on the old English. I would look at the words that were used decades ago and I would try to come up with words that are used today and that worked for a while because it was easier to understand a sentence with words I was familiar with. But as I kept reading the novel, I noticed that I was just focusing on the words connotation and it was just distracting me from the novel itself.

            The first chapter, The Custom House, was probably the hardest chapter in the entire novel and the one that discouraged me the most. This chapter was also what led me to use Spark notes because for some reason I just couldn’t pay attention on what I was reading. I would start spacing out and I had to stop reading it several times because I just couldn’t focus. Since the first chapter seemed super boring to me I though the whole book was going to be the same but as the story developed, it became more intense and interesting.  

            I remember using Spark notes back in High School, so I decided to use them for this novel. For one, Spark notes is way easier to understand and they have just the right amount of summary for each chapter; Spark notes just goes over the main points in the chapter but it was still helpful to read them because I found out that I would miss some important details from a chapter. There were also times when I interpreted the text differently or I just plain out didn’t get it and the summary’s brought me back and kept me on track. There are quizzes after each chapter in Spark notes so I would try to do them before reading the summary’s there so I could see if I got the concept of the chapter. I would then read the summaries and then I would try to do the quiz again so that I could see what part I did and didn’t understand.