The Scarlet Letter - Lies and Guilt People live with lies every day. Everyone from the President of the United States to the poorest beggar in New York has told a lie. White lies, gray and simple lies, old and dirty lies are spread every day like water from a fountain. The only real difference between them is the amount of guilt they place on the liar. If they feel guilty, they will suffer greatly throughout their lives, for many small indiscretions or for just one big indiscretion. Most people in this world have the ability to alleviate their guilt through some type of penance, but for some this is not enough. Nothing they do can erase the guilt and awareness of having done something wrong. People like this become sick with worries and regrets and often die from their illness: depression. Those people who manage to free themselves from guilt become productive members of society again because they have reconnected with the rest of the human race. They don't deny their guilt or their crimes, they simply recognize that there are some things they can't change, they can only try to fix it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the characters' decisions to admit or hide the truth determines the quality of their lives. While Hester Pryne admits her sins and resolves them over time through her charitable work, Arthur Dimmsdale represses his sins and, although he tortures himself physically, cannot resolve his great misdeeds. The first character to choose a path is Hester Pryne. Even if she had a child when she hadn't seen her husband for over a year (an obvious clue), she could have easily fled the colony before the birth. Instead, she stayed and confronted her peers, and in this way admitted her sin. Running away would have taken her down a completely different path, that of rejection. Hester did not entirely believe in Puritan ideals, but she knew that, according to the Bible, adultery was a sin against God. Only the enormous courage she had and the great sense of righteousness in her blood prevented her from escaping. He evidently believed that his form of penance would be sufficient to achieve his sanctity in the eyes of God, even though the Puritans held opposing beliefs: The Scarlet Letter explicitly states the impossibility of redemption for the sinner. If you don't let the world share your guilt, everything will fall on you, and you alone. With the crushing weight of guilt she would have had, she would not have lived longer than those seven years. Even the Puritan people who openly despised her when she denounced her sin were eventually won over by her vast charitable work. They began to associate the letter A with ability and not with adultery. And everything he got was because he told the truth, and the truth wasn't as bad as it seemed. Her husband was a deformed old man for whom she had no love. He had been missing for a long time and perhaps even thought he was dead. Her sin was remote and not entirely justified in the morality of these modern times, and she understood it even then. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne said it best: Be true! Be true! Be true! Freely show the world, if not your worst, at least some trait from which the worst can be deduced. (242) If all people know your worst, only then can they begin to solve it and begin to see your best. If all they see is the good side of you, then you are holding back from them, lying to them. Only when you show both sides do you begin to get penance, and that's exactly what Hester Pryne did. While Hester.