The novel’s narrator, Miles Coverdale, is a young Bostonian and a poet of some renown. He moves to Blithedale, hoping to start a new life in the commune. There, he befriends the charismatic Zenobia, the single-minded Hollingsworth, and the mysterious Priscilla. Initially, Coverdale fervently believes in the goals of Blithedale, but as the story progresses, he begins to doubt the socialist project. Often viewed as a veiled representation of Hawthorne himself, Coverdale expresses criticisms of the utopian commune similar to those Hawthorne later expressed about Brook Farm in his letters, including personal relationships impeding the desire for social cohesion and members finding themselves unable to find the energy for both manual labor and artistic creation.

An unreliable narrator, Coverdale often interjects details from his imagination into the narrative, admitting that when writing the story, his “pen has perhaps allowed itself a trifle of romantic and legendary license” (181). Coverdale’s imagination also leads other characters to doubt his motives; for example, Zenobia comments that Coverdale might turn “this whole affair into a ballad” (223). Indeed, Coverdale’s flights of fancy and capacity for assigning deeper meaning to possibly trivial events make his narration border the line between fantasy and reality, which echoes Hawthorne’s statement that the work offers readers “an available foothold between fiction and reality” (2).