Poe and Hawthorne's Literary Techniques: Perspectives on Inner Torments

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes his fiction in the third-person, omniscient viewpoint, while Edgar Allan Poe writes his stories in the first person. Each writer has a different effect that he usually gains from this technique.

Hawthorne uses omniscience because it allows him the scope to do several things: To comment on the story, and sometimes to judge the events and characters (e.g., to tell us that Hester Prynne is strong; that Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale is, in effect, neurotic, that Roger Chillingworth has become satanic and fiend-like; that several of Hawthorne's characters are grim and mistrustful). To explore the interior worlds of more than one main character (especially Hester, Dimmesdale and Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter). To show what other people besides the main characters are doing, and to describe what the townspeople in general are saying, thinking, and feeling (especially about ministers, and, also, Hester Prynne). To promote a detached viewpoint in the readers, so that we can study the events of the story and learn from them (but the lessons are open-ended; Hawthorne doesn't tell us what they are). To relate the deaths of his main, viewpoint characters (Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, Minister Hooper in "The Minister's Black Veil," young Goodman Brown in the story of the same name).