Most people believe they are the good guys. Ask any terrorist, thief or serial killer and they will all blame another factor or person for their actions. In the days of Puritanism, everyone participated in this realm of irrational thinking, or else they faced the fires of hell. They had to choose between accepting their sins, projecting their sins onto another, or fully succumbing to their sins in order to preserve their faith. It's why Hester Prynne receives the scarlet letter, it's why Arthur Dimmesdale laughs hysterically as he flagellates himself in the middle of the night, and it's why Roger Chillingworth becomes the evil shadow of his formal self. The way each character chose to deal with their sins revealed their true nature. Hester Prynne is the epitome of projected sin. As soon as her fellow citizens see that she is pregnant while her husband is away, they quickly punish her. She is imprisoned and forced to wear a scarlet letter "A" on her chest for adultery, ensuring that everyone who looks at her knows her blasphemous mistake. Hester takes the punishment with pride, proudly decorating the letter with gold trim and holding her head high. This unexpected pride makes her the perfect person to blame for the city. “So the young and the pure would learn to look upon her, with the flaming scarlet letter on her breast,—to her, the child of honorable parents,—toward her, the mother of a child, who would henceforth be a woman, — towards her, who had been innocent, — as the face, the body, the reality of sin. Page 63. Normally, sin is an intangible evil, but Hester's letter makes it physical. The town projects its sin and guilt onto Hester to avoid confronting its o...... middle of paper ......ke Dimmesdale or Hester. Instead, Chillingworth decides to accept his sin and embrace it in his very soul. He becomes a man possessed with the desire to harm the man who wronged him. This creates the ultimate evil, a person who, instead of facing guilt, doesn't feel it at all. The Scarlet Letter is a book that is all about sin and, more importantly, how people choose to deal with their sins. Hester is forced to confront her sin head on, Dimmesdale internalizes his sin until it builds up within him until his eventual death, and ultimately Chillingworth embraces his sins and the freedom they give him in order to take revenge. This is the nature of sin; it reaches its peak when everyone is aware of it. When sin is made public, it has the power to punish as it did with Hester, or to remove a burden as it did with Dimmesdale..