"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment:" Story Analysis

Biography:

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. He published several short stories in various periodicals; Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic Movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism.

Summary of the story:

The story started when Dr. Heidegger invite 4 people to his house, in his laboratory he gives them water from the fountain of youth, those 4 people ruined their lives when they were young, he wants to give them a second chance so they can make it right, unfortunately they don’t change, keep being the same people they were before, at the end the grow old again and Dr. Heidegger learns nothing from them.

Story's plot:

Characters in the story:

Dr. Heidegger was a very singular old man, he lost the love of his life then he started to study about the youth fountain.

Mr. Medbourne, in the vigor of his age, had been a prosperous merchant, but had lost his all by a frantic speculation, and was now little better than a mendicant.

Colonel Killigrew had wasted his best years in the pursuit of sinful pleasures, which had given birth to a brood of pains, such as the gout, and divers other torments of soul and body.

Mr. Gascoigne was a ruined politician, a man of evil fame, or at least had been so till time had buried him from the knowledge of the present generation, and made him obscure instead of infamous.

Widow Wycherly, tradition tells us that she was a great beauty in her day; but, for a long while past, she had lived in deep seclusion

Moral of the story:

There are some people that even when they get a second chance to do things different they keep making the same mistakes, somehow even after failure they think that they can get a different result doing the same thing over and over again.

Personal opinion:

I loved the story, it shows us how some people can destroy their own life, and even getting a second and final chance to change they won’t do it, we humans can be so into ourselves that it can actually be pretty scary, if we’ve done something wrong but still get a chance to fix it, that’s what we should do, fix it! Not do it again.