When something grand is expected with mounting anticipation and excitement, then met with underwhelming deliverance, the result is often a disillusioned person feeling cheated out of whatever he or she was looking forward to. Sometimes, the person may just be a victim of dire circumstances, but in others, where the people are but characters on a page and the instrument of a wary author, some irony can be found glimmering on the set. The author is its director, guiding the story and the actions toward the mountain top, only for the characters to find that the goal hoped for was never in the equation at all. At least, that is the case for Asbury Fox and one poor gentleman who just wanted to make it to Heaven. Flannery O’Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne expertly dissect the nature of anticipation, imagining a future reality as great as the imagination can make it, then suddenly bringing the excitement to a screeching halt at the stoplight of reality and adding ironic sparks to light up the story. In “The Enduring Chill” and “The Celestial Railroad,” written by the authors, respectively, the main characters are captivated by an idea that surpasses their meager surroundings and gives them hope of something higher to come or an experience to participate in. However, at the end of each short story, both Asbury Fox and the narrator are profoundly disappointed to find that what they were hoping for, what they had been led to believe at the end of their course, was never a part of the real world, only a figment of their imagination.
Asbury Fox returns home an embarrassing failure of a writer. Having been away at school and working part-time at a library in New York, he arrives at Teterboro searching for something to fill the hole that writing failed to fill. As he steps off the train, his mother, Mrs. Fox, sees not a healthy, joyful young man but instead “death in his face at once” (O’Connor 547). Asbury’s mind immediately condescends to his mother, wishing for her “to be introduced to reality, and he supposed that if the experience did not kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up” (547), seeing her as the one who appears to be living in the fantasy world and his sickness as the vehicle to which the light of reality will be shone upon her. Here, the irony begins, and it is later revealed in the story who is truly the one in the dream world. O’Connor masterfully sets up the central theme of every interaction that Asbury has once he returns home. Repeatedly, she uses the language of enlightened intellectuality combined with reality and fantasy wording to indicate a coming character check on Asbury. While preparing to depart for home, Mrs. Fox suggests that he see Dr. Block, the town physician. Asbury vehemently declines, declaring, “What’s wrong with me is beyond Block” (549) before choking back a sob. Though taken ill by some sickness and returning home, Asbury’s demeanor indicates an attitude of self-imposed superiority over his neighbors, who are intellectually backward, clueless, and immature. To Asbury, his ailment is no mere flu or cold but something much deeper, snaking its way to his heart, slowly depleting his body of life.
Unfortunately, Asbury’s perception is not reality at all: in more ways than one, in fact. Asbury lives in an imaginary world where he is the highest form of the enlightened mind. He refers to his sister as ugly and stupid (553), and his mother as foolish and the one caught up in fantasy (552-553). The fantasy, however, is in Asbury’s mind, where he views himself as a modernist and his neighbors as the ones stuck in the Dark Ages. However, the reality is that he is not as deep a thinker as he seems, and his sickness is not as severe as he imagines it to be. Claire Katz observes that Asbury’s worldview is skewed so that his “belief in the power of reason is made to seem ridiculous. Holding before [himself] the ideal of the enlightened mind, indeed, hiding behind it, [he] discovers that it crumbles to dust at the first confrontation with the intractable world” (65). When Asbury encounters the physical world, his dream world, where he is the Prometheus bringing fire to the mortals of Earth, crashes to the floor. He even tries to make this experience happen for himself. In a flashback, he smokes with the black help in the dairy and spoils a shipment of milk. Finding excitement in his mother’s distress, he goes even further and drinks the uncured milk against the advisement of the blacks. He proclaims his godlike ideology to the dumb dairymen, “We’ve got to think free if we want to live free!” (559) However, in his attempt to bring intelligence to the blacks, he is proved to be stupid himself. An incredible irony is displayed in how the black help’s common sense conquers Asbury’s foolish imagination. In another instance, while lying on the precipice of death, Asbury consults a priest, hoping to obtain an educated conversation with someone as intelligent as he. Once again, Asbury is disappointed as all the priest is concerned with is his catechism. O’Connor playfully pokes at Asbury’s self-proclaimed diagnosis when Asbury sulkily remarks, “I’m dying,” to which the priest righteously responds, “But you aren’t dead yet!” (566) The final blow is struck to Asbury’s prideful dream when the illness is exposed by Dr. Block, the one whom this ailment was supposed to be beyond, as nothing more than undulant fever contracted from drinking unpasteurized milk (571, 572). Over and over again, Asbury conjures figments of his imagination for himself and tries to paste them into reality. But the real world is no place for dreams; they dissipate like warm breath on a frigid January morning, disappearing as soon as they grasp the winter air. The story ends with the new chill, the chill of reality crashing into Asbury’s dream world, pulling apart his fantasy, showing himself to be the fool in the face of all that he thought to be beneath him.
The wide, easy, smoothest, and straightest road, never curvy or hilly, rarely results in the greatest reward. That road is often a lie, an illusion displaying the heart’s desire at a low price but resulting in a fabricated copy. Nathaniel Hawthorne displays this road as “The Celestial Railroad,” a railway that takes its travelers on a one-way trip from the carnal city of Destruction to the pearly gates, otherwise known as the Celestial City (316). The narrator of the story, a traveler on his way to the Celestial City, finds himself beside Mr. Smooth-it-away on the train, “who, though he had never actually visited the Celestial City, yet seemed as well acquainted with its laws, customs, policy, and statistics, as with those of the city of Destruction, of which he was a native-townsman” (316). It is interesting that the narrator chooses to follow a man who belonged to the city from the railroad proceeds, Destruction, yet had never been to the Celestial City. Mr. Smooth-it-away lacks all the proper requirements for being a guide in the first place.
From the beginning, Hawthorne sets up everything about the railroad as inconsistent with the values of true Christianity. At the Station House, the narrator observes that rather than “a lonely and ragged man, with a huge burthen on his back, plodding along sorrowfully on foot,” there are instead well-dressed, proper people “setting foot towards Celestial City, as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage were merely a summer tour” (318). Allusions to John Bunyan’s world-renowned work The Pilgrim’s Progress leap off the pages of the short story, and not without purpose, for Hawthorne uses images of his own in addition to the well-known allegories of Bunyan to highlight and italicize the overwhelming luxury language in contrast with Bunyan’s epic of self-denial, repentance, and grace-centric salvation. In his essay on “The Celestial Railroad,” Clifford A. Wood explains this very contrast, that rather than how “Christian had to shoulder his burdens, symbolic of the Puritan emphasis on guilt and sin, his modern counterpart, freed by the Unitarian’s negation of sin, has his luggage carried for him” (602). For the narrator and Mr. Smooth-it-away, there is no emphasis on carrying their burden, meditating on the weight of sin, but rather via the Celestial Railroad, the journey to Heaven can be quickly taken at any time simply by the punch of a ticket. While the train rolls on its way, it passes by “two dusty-footed travelers, in the old-pilgrims guise, with cockle-shell and staff…their intolerable burdens on their backs” (Hawthorne 320). Their method of travel “excited great mirth among our wise brotherhood. We greeted the two pilgrims with many pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter” (321). One wonders if Christ had to die when a steel-steam engine might carry sinners to the streets of gold. Unfortunately, the false nature of the railroad is exposed all too late. At the end of the story, Mr. Smooth-it-away shows himself to have “a twinkle of lurid flame in either eye, proving indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze” (335). The guide the narrator thought would show him the way to Heaven never intended to take him there. Where the pilgrims’ hard path led them to the joyous arms of eternal blessing (334), the narrator awakens from the dream at the brink of utter damnation.
Hawthorne and O’Connor both stand on their chairs and shout at the top of their lungs to warn their audiences of the dangers of living in a dream world. When one should allow oneself to orient one’s world around a misconception of reality, not only does one’s misconception harm one’s relationships, but it may also doom one’s soul. Rather than surrender to the wistful tales that humanity would weave, these two short stories tell a moral tale emphasizing testing dreams by the truth because when faced with the palpable surface of reality, dreams will vanish like smoke.
Works Cited
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Celestial Railroad.” Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches, edited by Michael J. Colacurcio, Penguin Books, 1987, pp. 316–35.
Katz, Claire. “Flannery O’Connor’s Rage of Vision.” American Literature, vol. 46, no. 1, 1974, pp. 54–67. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2924123. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025.
O’Connor, Flannery. “The Enduring Chill.” O’Connor: Collected Works, edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Library of America, 1988, pp. 547–72.
Wood, Clifford A. “Teaching Hawthorne’s ‘The Celestial Railroad.’” The English Journal, vol. 54, no. 7, 1965, pp. 601–05. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/811264. Accessed 15 Feb. 2025.
Clayton Hogue is from Nicholasville, Kentucky. He is a junior English Secondary Education major and a member of the track and cross-country team.
Pensworth 