OSCAR is an acronym designed to help readers understand direct and indirect characterization. Through the use of OSCAR, as a reading and writing strategy, readers are asked to think and write about the different ways they learn about a character.
“The Minister’s Black Veil” explores the themes of sin, guilt, secrecy, and isolation, aspects of the human condition that Transcendentalism tends to ignore or forget.
Ministers Black Veil Storyboards Direct and Indirect Characterization - OSCAR
Storyboard Text
MR. HOOPER
The narrator highlights Mr. Hooper’s sadness at how his veil separates him from friendship and makes him feared amongst the townspeople and, especially children. Yet, his call to the higher duty of wearing the veil outweighs his loneliness.
"Though reckoned a melancholy man, Mr. Hooper has a placid cheerfulness for such occasions, which often excited a sympathetic smile where the livelier merriment would have been thrown away. There was no quality of his disposition which made him more beloved than this."
"’I don’t like it,’ muttered an old woman, as she hobbled into the meetinghouse. ‘He has changed himself into something awful, only by hiding his face.’”
"’It is but a mortal veil - it is not for eternity! O! you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil. Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity forever!’”
The way that Mr. Hooper is described makes him sound odd; however, he also seems very sad. The veil separates him from everyone, including his fiance, and he dies without any living relatives around him