What is the moral of "The Ambitious Guest" by Hawthorne?

"The Ambitious Guest" was one of four stories Hawthorne
set in the rugged White Mountains of New Hampshire. The others were "The Great
Carbuncle," "Sketches from Memory," and "The Great Stone Face." The moral of "The
Ambitious Guest" is suggested in a comparison between the awesome age, grandeur and
power of nature versus the relative puniness of man with his brief lifespan and futile
ambitions. The setting of "The Ambitious Guest," like that of the other three stories
inspired by the White Mountains, is intended to convey the moral that nature is
indifferent to human wishes. A similar message is implicit in such literary works as
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Jack London's "To Build a Fire,"
and Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat."

Nathaniel Hawthorne
was the first successful American freelance writer. After graduating from Bowdoin
College in Maine, he wrote his mother:

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"I do not want to be a doctor and live
by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their
quarrels. So, I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an
author."

To make a
living as an author in America in Hawthorne's day was nearly an impossibility, because
the reading public was only interested in the characters and scenes that Europe had to
offer. As Henry James wrote in a book about Hawthorne, America had nothing to offer a
writer:

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No State, in the European sense of the
word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal
loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no
country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor
parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, no little
Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor
Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no
sporting class--no Epson nor
Ascot!

Hawthorne was
challenged to make up stories out of virtually nothing, and it was only due to his
imagination and craftsmanship that he was able to attract a wide enough audience to earn
a living. "The Ambitious Guest" is a good example of how Hawthorne took a barren setting
and peopled it with characters of his own invention. He chose not to give the characters
names, because he wanted to emphasize their insignificance in comparison to the wild and
dangerous desolation surrounding them.

Hawthorne does not
seem to be implying that man should not be ambitious, but only that man is ambitious by
nature and that his life is necessarily precarious. If he happens to achieve a limited
success, he is doomed by his mortality to lose everything he builds or acquires.
Probably the best expression of the moral of “The Ambitious Guest” is to be found in the
book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, in which the Preacher keeps repeating that
“All is vanity and vexation of spirit.” Hawthorne’s illustration of man’s impermanence
in his somber short story suggests the following lines from
Ecclesiastes:

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One generation passeth away, and
another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for
ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth
down, and hasteth to his place where he
arose.

George R.
Stewart used the words "Earth Abides" as the title for his best novel, and Ernest
Hemingway used the words "The Sun Also Rises" for one of his early
novels.