The answer to these questions can be found in the literary devices Hawthorne’s simple plot structure is cloaked in. While the stories’ skeleton is transparent, its flesh and spirit are opaque, hiding its simplistic plot and elevating its complex theme through moments of clear reality, broken allegory, and the darkness of  dreams or shadowy aberrations.  Hawthorne intentionally muddles the boundaries of the protagonists’ conscious reality, unconscious dreams, and the stories’ allegorical symbolism, so the reader feels, “a loathful brotherhood” of empathy with the protagonist’s eventual “stern” and “sad” state due to his failure to accept the evil ,with the good, in the nature of mankind.  (Hawthorne/pg.944 & 945).  That in fact, Brown’s absolute ideology, will mire humankind into the Slough of Despond.