He takes a different approach, though. Young Goodman Brown has an encounter with the devil in a dream. At the time we do not know it is a dream, but Young Goodman Brown is talking to the devil who is trying to convince him that people like his father, grandfather, and his priests and deacons, etc. have come to him to seek some sort of revenge. Making Young Goodman Brown think that all of these other people have also done the things like sin, shocks him, but also makes him feel like it is not as bad if he does sin. Before anything goes wrong Young Goodman Brown wakes up from this awful dream, but now he is questioning everything and everyone.
Young Goodman Brown has lost all hope and is now an empty vessel waiting to be filled with sin. This shows how Young Goodman Brown’s lost of faith has allowed him to be less than human. He becomes a shadow of himself looking for trouble and specifically the devil. In an essence, Young Goodman Brown’s internal conflict vanishes and the story continues to resolve the external conflict.
During his journey of sin, Young Goodman Brown and the devil come upon Goody Cloyse, Young Goodman Brown's catechism teacher, and, still believing that she is a “pious and exemplary dame” Goodman Brown tries to stay away from the woman by pleading with the devil “I shall take a cut through the woods… being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with” (3). Because of Young Goodman Brown’s beliefs of her innocence, it is even more jolting to him when she “knows her old friend,” the devil, and speaks about stolen broomsticks, recipes including “the juice of smallage and cinquefoil and wolf’s-bane,” and even the same devilish meeting that Young Goodman Brown and his accomplice are to attend (3). With signs that all point to sin and witchcraft, Young Goodman Brown’s shock in saying “That old woman taught me my catechism” had “a world of meaning” as he cannot possibly believe that a woman known to be so holy and righteous in the community could be so evil within. As Goodman Brown moves past the shock of Goody Cloyse’s actions, he is exposed to the sins of the holiest members of their Puritan community, the minister and Deacon Gookin. While Goodman Brown shamefully “[conceals] himself within the verge of the forest… he recognized the voices of the minister and Deacon Gookin” who speak of the same evil “meeting” as Goody Cloyse and even remark that “several of the Indian powwows” will even be present (4,5).
Has your mind ever played tricks on you? In the story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the main character, Goodman Brown, seems to experience just that. He’s travelling through the forest with another man who can only be described as the devil himself, and at the end of the story the reader is left to wonder if anything that took place even truly happened. Hawthorne uses many literary devices to convey that deception comes in many shapes and forms, the worst of which can be your own mind.
In “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne the old man is a symbol for the Devil. The old man appears as soon as Goodman Brown mentions the Devil, carries a staff that resembles a serpent, and the way the old woman reacts to the old man. By creating a physical embodiment of satan in the work, the author demonstrates how even the spiritually strongest can fall into temptation and sin. Straightaway, as soon as Goodman Brown enters the forest he imagines seeing the Devil and the old man appears.
Goodman decides to turn around after meeting up with his guide, but he guide convinces him to reason with him as they continue on their journey. The devil tells Goodman that the best men are secretly evil, and that if he joins the devil in the devil’s baptism that he will have knowledge of everyone’s hidden secrets. The devil continues to try to convince him, and Goodman starts to believe his lies. The devil has the power to deceive and he alludes Goodman to believe that he is seeing a woman he knows very well. And again, he is sure that someone he knows is walking by-
In “Young Goodman Brown”, by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Désirée’s Baby”, by Kate Chopin, the main characters, Goodman Brown, and Désirée lose some sort of innocence in their stories. Both characters go through troubling situations in which their minds are shattered from what they have seen and heard. The characters go through a certain experience and as a result they lose this innocence which becomes their downfall. In both stories, the authors use different literary elements such as symbolism and allegory.
As the tale went on the secret sin showed in Young Goodman Brown, how he was affected by the secret sin in the lives of others, and how this change his relationship with people he lived near. Young Goodman Brown was an innocent man in his society, and he always saw that others had this same character as well. That aspect shifted on the night he met the devil. When the secret sin made its appearance into the home of the area where they all lived in.
The Twentieth-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had the right idea when he stated that "ownership extends beyond objects to include intangible things as well"; because the foundation of one 's self-identity is also a bridge between the intangible things that one can own and how one perceives those items. When traveling through that journey in life where you are trying to figure out who you are and what that entitles, one must likely thinks and ponders upon their perception of intangible items like faith, love, hope, fear to fully understand themselves. Goodman Brown in the story "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne touched upon the building of ones identity based upon the ideals/morals they believed in when it came to the item of faith. He understood that he was a child of god who had committed sins and so he thought that maybe he deserved to be comrades with the devil and accept the concept of evil into his life. However by the end of the story, Goodman Brown believed in his identity and he knew that he believed in God and had faith so he denied the Devil.
His family (just like anyone else’s) gives him his background and defines who he is; therefore, when the devil shows that even they sin Brown is distraught. Though Brown does not want to, he starts to believe the devil when he says, “I have been as well acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans” (Hawthorne 2). In the previous quote it shows that not only his family but also others have followed him, so Brown will have to accept it or let it take over his life. Brown chooses the latter of the two.
Goodman Brown loses his faith in his humanity when evil prevails itself in many forms, leaving him to speculate the behavior and beliefs of everyone encircles around him. This story also contains similar Biblical characteristics of the sinful nature in man. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses symbolism to define that wickedness exist in all humanity and nothing is the way it seems. The story begins with Goodman Brown and his wife named Faith bartering a goodbye kiss.
In Young Goodman Brown, a young man falls to sin. Due to the Calvinist beliefs Goodman Brown held, he presumed that his justification would exempt him from the evils of sin. His conviction reflected the sin of presumption, and his presumption caused him to lose his conviction. As a result, he enacted in the unpardonable sin.
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.
The Weimar republic founded after the Kaisers abdication in 1918 (LINK) is believed by many to have been doomed to fail from its inception on the 9th November 1918. It is believed to have been doomed due to the economic, social, political factors present during its inception and reign as well as the very constitution it was hastily founded upon after the Kaisers abdication. These factors include the increased gaps between the classes, the budget constraints brought on by the war, the failing industry, conservative judges, political unrest as well as the Weimar’s constitution. These factors combined would doom the Weimar republic and allow men attached to right or left wing ideologies to try and seize power from the instable Weimar republic
To start the devil manipulated him by pretending to be Faith and as Young Goodman Brown is along his journey, he pretends to call Young Goodman Brown as a trick to pull him closer and he succeeds. Manipulation, a very powerful lesson learned as readers can tell how the devil himself used nature, and others around him to get what he
