The Puritan society had many contradictions to their religion. “Young Goodman Brown”, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is about a young man traveling through a forest to meet a devil-like person and discovers that everyone he knows is on the side of an evil person. This depresses him and he never fully recovers being able to trust his loved ones again. The character of Goodman Brown adjusts the reader’s understanding of Puritan ideals of religion by appealing the hypocrisy of the Puritan religion.
Kairos is applied by Hawthorne when he paces the story from being slow and normal, to a different dark setting in a forest. After the tranquil and suspenseful story up until he goes further in the forest, Brown starts to experience visual changes.
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He declares that, “There is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own!”(Hawthorne). Hawthorne’s use of symbolism in this sentence is to have the reader be able to think of his actual wife’s name, Faith, and him breaking his faith by talking to the evil man. “Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying -- “Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness”(Young). As Faith is being taken away he is calling out to it and trying to regain his faith. Goodman Brown has lost his faith and he believes that the forest’s sounds are mocking him. “The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds; the creaking of trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while, sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn”(Young). Hawthorne uses personification, irony, and a simile in this quote. It’s ironic that church bells are heard after he loses his faith. Hawthorne is using figurative language to convey how Goodman has lost his