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"Young Goodman Brown"

The purpose of this paper is to discuss "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne's brief allegorical tale, "Young Goodman Brown," raises questions about the nature of good and evil and the ambiguity of the conflict between these two opposing forces. The protagonist and title character, Goodman Brown, is a young man struggling to remain good in the face of temptation to succumb to evil. The struggle is not a clearly defined one but rather involves confusion and uncertainty. Indeed, Hawthorne's central thesis seems to be that life itself is ambiguous, that motives and actions do not permit a single interpretation but rather have a number of different possible interpretations.

On the surface, the story would seem to be a reworking of the Faustian legend using Puritan New England as the setting. In the opening sequence, Goodman Brown is leaving his young wife Faith to go off into the woods on some mysterious errand, which is left unspecified but involves some "evil purpose." As he starts out, Brown vows to himself that after this one night he'll return to his wife, "cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven" (54). He meets a sinister stranger at a fork in the road and the two set off together into the darkest part of the forest. The author does not reveal the exact purpose of this journey, nor does he reveal the stranger's identity, but it nevertheless is clear that the stranger is the devil, and he is leading Brown into temptation.

Brown seems to be going along willingly, of his own volition, yet he is troubled and at one point tries to turn back. The devil convinces him to continue on, but still he is reluctant, believing himself to come from a race of "honest men and good Christians" and he the first to take such a path (56). At this point comes the first crucial revelation of the story -Brown's father and grandfather apparently did indeed consort with the devil, as had, according to the stranger, m...

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"Young Goodman Brown". (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:44, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682680.html