Review: Ethan Brand

Ethan Brand by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

43 mins. I read this on Hoopla. I borrowed an Ebook and an Eaudiobook from Hoopla! I read this because it was mentioned in "Memnoch the Devil" by Anne Rice on page 126.

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Ethan Brand by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ebook I borrowed from Hoopla.

The Eaudiobook I borrowed from Hoopla.

Here is a quote from Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice.

“Still I said nothing. What was I to say? Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.

Meaningless, I almost said, aloud, but what came from my lips was completely different” (Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice, 127).

How true this is, Lestat. Despair can be banished by beautiful things. For me personally despair can be banished by reading books I love and other things too.

Before this quote David quotes from “Ethan Brand” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I just finished reading it and it is quite dark and despairing like how Lestat explains here. It’s essentially a story of Ethan Brand who finds the Unpardonable Sin and kills himself by fire, which was his occupation as a lime-burner. From what I got from that story I think he killed himself because he realized that he wasn’t part of humanity anymore and so did away with himself. David said that this is how he feels about himself and humanity, though I don’t think David would jump into the fire. I think David’s trying to say that he can still grow his intellect but not his morality. Then Lestat thinks about his own despair when David tells him this.

Although I read this because it was mentioned in the novel I’m currently reading, I still think it was a dark story and it made sense why it was included in Memnoch. I see a lot of similarities with this short story and The Vampire Chronicles.

I also wanted to say that the old dog part was funny too! XD

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“As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man had enveloped himself.”

This made me sad because even the little boy could feel Ethan’s despair.

“He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.”

This is the quote that David recited to Lestat while they walked the streets of Manhattan. There is so much to unpack with this quote.