Young Goodman Brown

Simone Sutton

10/19/09

AP English III

Young Goodman Brown

Things are not always as they seem, and sometimes they are worse. No one can ever be sure of what is real either. Sometimes our imaginations are so powerful that they cam completely change who we are.

Goodman Brown is going to run an errand that he does not want his wife to know about. The young couple is passionately in love and it seems nothing can destroy the love they have for each other. “What a wretch am I to leave her on such an errand?” We still do not know what Goodman Brown is going to do yet but, we can tell he is not proud of what he is going to. He thinks so highly of his wife faith that he is sure that being with her will make up for the thing he is about to do. “… And after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to heaven.” On the surface this sentence suggests that Goodman Brown is just using his wife, but deeper this sentence means that he can barely stand to be away from her. He doesn’t want to do what he is about to do but, he can only hope that it won’t condemn him to hell and separated him from his wife.

Much like Tom Walker, Goodman Brown walks down a dark path leading him to trouble. “He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest.” A dreary ominous path is leading him to his traveling companions. Unlike Tom Walker, though, Goodman Brown is not oblivious to the darkness and evil around him but rather hyper-aware of it. “”There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”” And instead of taking the path home, to where he wants to be, he is taking it away from home, and to a place he doesn’t want to be. Goodman Brown is afraid of what he has to do. “… having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return to whence I came”. Not only is he afraid he is trying to come up with any sort of excuse to get himself out of this situation before he gets into something he can’t get out of.

By now we’ve learned that Brown set out to be inducted into an evil brotherhood of which and he is surprised to see people he recognizes from his town there, like members of the clergy and other upright pious people from the community, which is strange, and possibly ironic, considering the fact that they are all from Salem, the same community who killed people who were thought to be witches. Despite seeing these people coming to this witches ceremony to be inducted, Goodman Brown is firm in his faith in god.””With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!””. Instead of succumbing to peer pressure he vows to oppose the dark things he sees. The only reason he stays to witness the ceremony is out of pure curiosity, he can’t help himself.

“Then came a stronger swell of those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village, but never until now from a cloud of night”. Goodman Brown hears a familiar voice in the darkness. It is his wife Faith and she is being pressured to come to the ceremony by the same people from the community. “Both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward”. Goodman Brown calls her name but she is gone. Without Faith Brown has nothing. This is because Faith is a symbol of his ‘spiritual’ faith, if she could be consumed by the deviltry of the ceremony then so would be his spiritual faith.

When Goodman Brown wakes up in the forest it is unknown whether or not his experience was a dream or reality. On his walk home he sees all of the people who were present the night before, like the Deacon and Cloyse, as they should be, the religious upright people they are. But Goodman Brown is still wary of them. If what he experience the night before then he has reason to be wary, but if it really was a dream then the dream was so vivid it completely changed him. In the end he is never the same again. “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream.”, “they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.” Compared to the happy, loving man at the beginning of the story, Goodman Brown’s end was the complete opposite of what his beginning character suggests.