Young Goodman Brown

Waking up from a nightmare creates vivid images that instill real fear. It is hard to decipher reality from what was imagined and the actions that follow are a result of those fictitious images. The ideas create reality. In “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne portrays a man who is questioning what he sees in front of him. The notions created in his mind tricked his actions to betray himself and those around him. Goodman’s reality was his nightmare and his inward questioning led to his outward conformity and resulted in his self-destruction.

Young Goodman Brown was a naïve individual who had a comfortable life. He lived in an ironic town of Salem. He was someone who was religious and believed in the good heartedness of the people in his village and yet he lived in the village of the Salem witch trails. His wife was the symbol of youth and happiness with her pink ribbon. Her ribbon was the essence of her purity and complemented Brown’s persona.  She is good and has not been touched by the evil she believes lives in loneliness. Brown had a life that was contradictory to his rich town and this leads to the reader foreshadowing the future events. Young Goodman Brown was young, pure, and good intentioned as influenced by his conformity to his nurtured life

Young Goodman Brown began to question his life as he dived further into the darkness of his mind. The old man was the inception of the idea that Young Goodman Brown wasn’t whom he saw himself and his life as. Goodman saw those around him as pure, but as the Old Man and Goody Cloyse began to show him the other side of human nature. He saw the evil and secrets of those around him and felt the paranoia of his comfortable life. The woods that Goodman enters symbolize his twisted and confusing life and it changes the plot of the story of one that was known to something that was not. The woods are where all the inward questioning occurs. Goodman is forced to witness his reality slipping away. The ritual he witnesses is his pure soul vanishing before his eyes as seen with the loss of the pink ribbon from Faith’s hair. “ My Faith is gone,” this metaphor is representative of the loss of his old life. Young Goodman Brown was fed evil but the Old Man and he took the bait and caved to become what the society around him was.

Once Young Goodman Brown was introduced to the reality of his own mind, he let his constant paranoia and questioning of those around him change who he was. His nightmare became his life and he truly lost his faith. He became too involved in himself and became selfish and showed the evil side to himself. He saw the true nature of the town and people around him and this truth was too much for him to handle. He was not a strong individual and couldn’t handle what he was shown. Young Goodman Brown died like the men and women he was surrounded by.

Young Goodman Brown was a man who’s questioning of those around him led to his ultimate outward changing to the ideas he believed in his head. His story is a metaphor for the inevitable influence that the environment has on individuals. We can try so hard to stand out and be our own person but the power that we have on ourselves to believe what we tell ourselves is greater than how hard we try to make sense of everything. Young Goodman Brown changed himself from the truth he felt he saw and nothing could tell him otherwise which led to his ending.