Good Vs. Evil In The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

Stories, short or long, possessing a moral or for fun, fiction or fact, serve as the medium to share the history of humanity. Within these stories one often finds a concept of good versus evil. While good always seems to prevail, there remains something special about the way the concept of evil has woven its way throughout the history of American literature. Evil seeks to create fear and this fear draws from the dark and shoves into the light the symbol of a monster. What defines this monster has morphed based on what evokes fear in the quivering hearts of weak men. These monsters may have been written in stories of fiction or they may have stemmed from nonfictional events, whichever the case they had an acute ability to weave their way through
In this period of the Enlightenment, many colonists moved away from the church’s strict rules and narrow- minded teachings and looked toward more modern views and lifestyles. The name Satan didn’t command as much power as it once did. In his place a different type of monster emerged. Less religious and more supernatural creatures struck dread into the hearts of men. Ghosts and ghoulish figures drifted into American authors nighttime terrors. This transition can be clearly seen in stories like the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. The “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” takes place in a quaint neighborhood which, “abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions.” (Irving n.p.). The Headless Horseman serves as the most renowned specter in the entire town of Sleepy Hollow. When he appears in the mortal world, the Horseman presents the appearance of a, “ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannonball in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War” (Irving n.p.). He rides upon horseback toward the battlefield in search of his lost head and at times offer rides and challenge races to travelers. Another story that has a sense of a spiritual being wreaking havoc on a human is Edgar Allen’s poem “The Raven”. In this work by Po, a man quietly naps at his home when strange noises begin to sound. What he believes to be a visitor at his door becomes for him the essence of fear from the great beyond. The raven inexplicitly begins to repeat “nevermore” and the reader is left to wonder if this is Lenore communicating from beyond the veil. In this early American time, death was believed to be the final end in life. Now there was an idea that provided a sense of dread that one could return and it sparked