Goodman is the best representative of people who have lost their beliefs in the true, the good and the beautiful things on earth; they would rather submit themselves to the evil sides. Many of us are simply a copy of Goodman Brown, swaying back and forth between truth and wrong. Sometimes we can make a righteous decision but other times we are like Goodman Brown destroyed by our own human nature. At the assembly, Devil, who disguised as an old man, says to Goodman Brown, “Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.” That is to say evil dwells in everyone’s mind. Like Goodman Brown, people usually think the depravity of human must be caused by evil other than themselves. Here, the story allegorizes that it is our human nature that results in the fatal mistake. R.H. Fogle writes, “Goodman Brown, a simple and pious nature, is wrecked as a result of disappearance of the fixed poles of his belief. His orderly cosmos dissolves into chaos as church and state, the twin pillars of the society, are hinted to be rotten, with their foundations undermined.”(Hurley) When Goodman Brown suddenly realizes that all his fellow men, including his mentor of youth, the priest in the church…, have become converts of Devil, he is in an extremely desperate state, not knowing who to believe ever after. So he falls after attending the gathering in the forest at that night, losing all his faith.
Furthermore, In “Young Goodman Brown,” the devil appears to be an ordinary man,