Life & Mortality Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne lands the line like a grim party trick: you brace for melodrama, and he swerves into farce. The speaker imagines suicide - the most private, self-authored catastrophe - then admits to being “saved” by something even worse: murder. The joke is not that death is funny. It’s that agency is. Hawthorne’s narrators often crave an escape hatch from the moral pressure cooker of their own minds, yet they’re equally terrified of choosing the escape. So the fantasy becomes perversely bureaucratic: if someone else does the deed, the self is spared the sin, the responsibility, the final act of will.

That’s the subtext doing the heavy lifting. It reads like a confession disguised as wit: I wanted out, but I wanted innocence even more. The phrase “altogether beyond his hopes” is the tell - hope, here, is corrupted into a desire for erasure without culpability. It’s a Protestant-era loophole, the kind Hawthorne can’t stop circling: guilt as inheritance, guilt as atmosphere, guilt as plot engine.

Contextually, this sits comfortably in Hawthorne’s broader project: characters haunted by unseen judgments, trapped between internal temptation and external punishment. He’s writing in a culture where moral accounting is relentless, and he turns that into psychological suspense. The line’s brilliance is its double bind. Even when fate “helps,” it does so by tightening the screw: the universe grants your wish in the only way that guarantees you can’t feel clean about it.