Humanity And Deceitful Faith In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

Imagine going through your whole life being ignorant to the evil around you, then it is suddenly shown to you all at once. The evil in people you love and grew up with, how would you react? In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” this is exactly what happened. Young Goodman is taken on a journey by a man who may or may not be the devil, but ultimately leads him and shows the corruption of the religious leaders in the community. They end up at the end of the road where Young Goodman finds himself in the middle if a satanic ritual and this leads to Young Goodman being distant and cold to the people around him not knowing if this was all real or just a dream. This story conveys the theme of superficial and deceitful faith in characters,

The townspeople first off go to church and talk the talk of faithful Christians, but as we see there is a darker side that may not be too far behind the façade. Young Goodman Brown also furthered the theme by just showing genuine and utter shock as he found out about the people and his parents, he thought were good moral people. He fought this thought and exclaimed, ‘My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians since the days on the martyrs” (190). This also shows Young Goodman’s innocence, and we can see the gradual decline of this virtue as he continues into the forest. Faith, Young Goodman’s wife, played a role in his life as she kept him grounded in what was good. He even says, “Faith kept me back awhile” (190). This shows that she was keeping him from going down a dark road. She helped keep him, you guessed it, be faithful. Even as he lost all trust in the people he grew up with and even his own parents. There also was the old man, who also could be interpreted as the devil, pulled Young Goodman away from his faith and began to show the town’s real

Superficial and deceitful faith. Young Goodman Brown is taken on a journey by the old man, the devil, and show all the cracks and holes in his view of the people he loved and how they had a tainted past that was not repented of. Eventually bringing Young Goodman into a satanic ritual showing the true colors if these deceitful people. It is told in an omniscient third-person point of view which gives us the feeling of being outside the story while still being able to focus on Young Goodman on his journey. It gives us the ability as readers to know everything but still see the story