This concluding chapter serves to answer whatever questions the reader may have after the final scaffold scene. As is his fashion, Hawthorne lends his customary ambiguity and vagueness to many of the questions by citing various points of view or options related to incidences without anointing any one of them as true. One such incident involves what people actually saw when Dimmesdale exposed his bosom on the scaffold. He presents several possible versions of the spectators at the scaffold that day including that some saw no letter on Dimmesdale’s chest. He attributes this last version to the loyalty of friends to Dimmesdale.
Hawthorne explains that the moral of the story, gleaned from an old manuscript of testimony of people who had known Hester, is based on “the poor minister’s miserable experience, and he states a kind of moral for us: “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait by which the worst may be inferred.” This often quoted moral about being true to oneself leaves the reader thinking about the characters in the story and which ones were true and what prices they paid.
