The body of the tale is a recounting of a story that Roderick Elliston, the main character of "Egotism," has composed as a result of his "former sad experience". Both the frame of the tale, in which Roderick discusses his story with his wife Rosina and his friend Herkimer (a sculptor), and the tale itself as told by Roderick criticize the lack of substantial existence of those figures who live only in the ideal world, what Hawthorne describes as an "unsubstantial" dream world. Such a focus suggests that the tale, through a definition of the "spiritual" nature of the artist, is Hawthorne's reaction against the Transcendentalist aesthetic with which he had come into contact in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
