Young Goodman Brown

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is a strange and unsettling story of a young man who travels through a wood overnight and allows his experience to change him forever. There are many themes in this short story, including the age-old theme of good and evil, but a close reading of the work can make the reader thing Brown's journey is a symbolic acting out of his own sinful nature and his secret inclination toward evil, and many critics feel that way too. Brown very well could have dreamed the entire sequence in the woods, because there is a fantasy and dreamlike quality to it, but under it all was his own guilt at the evil that dwelt inside him.

Young Goodman Brown is not an inherently evil character, but each person has some evil or hatred that lives within him or her. Many never allow it to...
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