Wakefield is a middle-age man. He is intellectual but sluggish and calm. His life is similar to life of a hermit who abnegates sexual affection. His characteristics have the capacity to be enlightened, but he is just still lacking of energy as if he is sleeping. Then, he does a mistake, which later he learns. He breaks out from the social norm, leaving his wife and his home. But in the end, when the rain pours, his instinct, like an animal’s one, drives him to find a dry and comfort place. Eventually, he is rushing into his house without awareness.
After twenty-year of Wakefield’s self-banishment, Hawthorne suggests that Wakefield encounters a great moral change. Wakefield, which a part of his name “wake” suggests “awakenings” (Sterling 128), suddenly realizes the importance of living in a family, as Hawthorne describes him when he returns home as “a loving spouse till death”(Hawthorne 75). Therefore he awakes from the darkness.
At the end, Wakefield is described as “the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 80). Hawthorne gives a moral that once one steps out; he may lose his own spot, and cannot fit in the society again and forever.