"Young Goodman Brown" (LRB)

“Young Goodman Brown”

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

“We are a people of prayer, and works of good boot…” but the wickedness is still always present. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” explains the doubt of young people in the Quaker religion. As he display the same theme.

The story begins with Faith warning her husband not to go into the treacherous woods. Goodman, or the good man as the story alludes him to be, tells his wife not to trouble herself with bad dreams, but it is he who inevitably falls to bad dreams.

As Goodman begins he thinks, “…the devil himself should be at my very elbow” and he most definitely is. Goodman meets a man with a serpent shaped staff who has many devilish characteristics, such as deceit, lies and guilt. He lures Goodman deeper and deeper into the forest until he begins to see figures from his church congregation, such as Deacon Gookin, Goody Cloyse, and the reverend himself. All are deceived by the satanic figure and his staff.

Throughout his quest, Goodman always talks about his wife Faith, who represents his own Puritan faith. Faith warned him not to go into the forest, but he denied his Faith. He beacons to Faith, in all times of need, but there is no answer. It is not until the end when he realizes that his Faith is gone that he loses all hope.

Goodman eventually wakes up to the realization that he has only fallen asleep and the torture that he just went through was but a dream or as he called it “an evil omen.” The dream that he had warned his own Faith to avoid, he endured. He, in his own doubt caused by the devil, begins to thing everyone is sinful. He even got sick when the reverend touched the Bible on the Sabbath. The devil to this hopeful man who was indeed a good man, and twisted him into a man who no one had hopeful thing to say about him and he died in his own gloom.