Sin In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

What is a Goodman? Sin can be labelled by many names and have many appearances. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, sin is expressed in many different forms and challenges the main character’s outlook on the world. Due to this experience, the main character named Young Goodman Brown completely changes his opinion and view on the people around him. Young Goodman Brown may have been traumatized by this event, but he should not have let it completely revoke his ability to be happy with his life and the people that he loved. A dark cloud was cast over this man’s head, and he should have done something to keep it from affecting the rest of his life. Let’s begin with the background of this story. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne was born

That all changes when he leaves his wife to venture out into the forest for a single night. The meaning behind this is that he is attempting to temporarily leave his Puritan faith and beliefs to commit sins for a single night, testing the waters, if you will. He then has a nightmare while in the woods that everyone he has ever surrounded himself with in life are witches and sinners, and that they are worshipping the devil. The vision also makes it appear that Young Goodman Brown is to join them that night, but when he sees his wife, Faith, he refuses and attempts to escape. He wakes up as the sun is rising, and he has been completely traumatized from this nightmare. His entire outlook is forever changed, and his innocent viewpoint has dissipated. The problem with his reaction is the fact that he let this one event influence his entire life, and he adopts skepticism similar to the author’s. Young Goodman Brown has lost his faith in both his religious beliefs and in his fellow men around him, and it casts a very dark cloud above him. His own choices caused him to never feel happiness again, and all through having a family he remains negative. He even dies never feeling a positive emotion since that night in the forest. He should not have let that one night prevent him from allowing himself some semblance of

“Through experiences with aural and observational witness, Brown changes his beliefs over the course of the story, and his hesitancy throughout the evening is evidence that what he heard and saw effectuated a spiritual uncertainty within Brown that resulted in his eventual affliction with lifelong doubt.” (Crawford) This quote directly demonstrates how much this one night in the forest affecting Young Goodman Brown’s life. The quote also directly shows how far too extreme mistakes born of human nature affect the minds of fully-devoted Puritans like Young Goodman