Young Goodman Brown
Analyzing the story Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne we see a young man that is happily married and believes truly in his wife, Faith. He also seems to have some doubts in his faith and therefore goes to the forest, and there faces the temptations of sin, evil, and darkness. The reader sees that Goodman Brown is not a bad man just because he walks into the dark forest; and often he feels like going back, but the devil, keeps him walking forward. Before he leaves Faith at home, we see her begging him to stay because of a bad dream she has, but he goes anyway. Faith is the only symbol of hope in the story; she is symbolic of their love and also the faith and devotion he has for God. When he leaves Faith, he is leaving his faith for God. When
Goodman Brown first encounters the devil, he says that he was late because Faith kept me back a while, indicates his faith in God delayed him. In his journey through the forest with the devil, Young Goodman Brown slowly loses the faith he has in God, especially when he confronts Goody Cloyse conversing with the devil since she was his teacher and his spiritual guide. When he says, why should he quit my dear Faith, and go after her, the devil tosses him his staff which transmits symbolically his evil to Goodman Brown.
He heard Faiths voice in the forest and his faith is then shattered. As her pink ribbons float down to the ground, which is a symbol of their innocence, love, and faith being destroyed, which causes young Goodman Brown to lose his faith completely. He declares that there is no good on earth. He then allows the staff of evil to guide him again, and since he has no faith, there is nothing to keep him away from the flower of the devil.
When he witnesses the witches ceremony, he is reunited with many puritans from the village, he and Faith are led to the alter to be baptized by the devil but the moment before grabs her and says look up to heaven and resist the evil one bringing hope back to his life. The next moment he falls unconscious.
Young Goodman Brown is reunited with Faith during the ceremony and the devil appears before his followers and says that "Evil is the nature of mankind" and he welcomes the converts to "communion of your race." At that point, we find that Goodman Brown is completely alone, there is no faith left in him and he is completely devastated when he wakes up from this dream, it is all so real that he cant separate dreams from reality.
The rest of his life is destroyed because he believes that everything that happened in the dream is real and he was never able to live with this truth. Not only is everyone around him the nature of evil but also he sees himself being the only one with any good in all these people that have no faith left. The irony is that the devil makes Goodman Brown the evil to only see the bad thing in people therefore he is truly destroyed and this shows all this insecurities that end up killing him inside.
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