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Young Goodman Brown Analysis

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Young Goodman Brown Analysis
Young Goodman Brown Analysis

The gloom Young Goodman Brown is feeling from the truth he discovers during the night is completely justified. How could it not be after such a traumatic experience? His entire image of the world around him was shattered. The people he new and looked up to, were not what he spent his life believing them to be. There are many passages by Young Goodman Brown that portray these thoughts, feeling, loss of innocence, and changes to his perception in the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne. What immediately stood out to me was the sweet exchange of words Goodman and Faith had, at the train station before his departure. Faith had bad dreams and negative thoughts about Goodman’s trip and does not want him to leave. Goodman replies, “My love and my Faith, of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee.” This line was the best. I have never heard a better way to tell a woman that I can not spend time with her. This line will be used by me at some time in my life. I wonder how much better Goodman’s life would have been if he would have listened to faith. Goodman regarded Faith as his anchor to everything that is right in the world. Faith, with her pink ribbons, is what could right any of the wrongs that might happen to him on his trip. “After this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven,” he tells himself in the fashion of a silent prayer, pleading to make it through the night. I see this concept, of using Faith as a prayer, when he meditates on the phrase, “what calm sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations.” It seemed as if everyone from the village had a relationship with the devil. “I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem: and it was I that brought your father a

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