Young Goodman Brown Comparison

As circumstances of life are sometimes difficult, we often use positive memories or thoughts to mask the true difficulties of our lives. Often at funerals, a speaker calls the congregation to “celebrate the life, don’t mourn the death.” Rather than focusing on the tragedy we may have just experienced, we instead depend on nostalgia and optimism to shield us from hard realities. In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O 'brien and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, both characters utilize thoughts of a woman back home to carry them through traumatic experiences (war and a satanic ceremony). However, when the women fail to meet the impossible standards of the men’s thoughts, the men are left without solace and in a pit of misery. The idealized descriptions

Initially, Brown is terrified of ever hurting or disappointing Faith, describing her as a “blessed angel on Earth.” Faith’s “peeping,” pink-ribbon-clad figure is clearly an idealized version in Brown’s mind of his wife as he trek’s into the unknown. In Faith’s first sentence of the story, she bids Brown to “sleep in [his] own bed,” overtly associating her with a sense of home (2). As Goodman Brown treks out into the dark forest, he tethers his sense of safety and familiarity to his image of Faith’s concerned face. Hawthorne also describes Faith as “aptly named” (1). Religious faith, to Goodman Brown, represents his family, his traditions, and his idea of proper society. He describes his own family as “a race of honest men and good Christians since the days of the martyrs” (17). Faith, to Goodman Brown, is analogous to religious faith as the epitome of proper, safe society. In the things they carried, Cross paints a nearly impossibly perfect image of Marth. In the picture of her playing volleyball there is “no visible sweat,” she is wearing “white gym shorts,” and her virgin-like legs are “dry