Young Goodman Brown Analysis
“Young Goodman Brown” “Be it so if you will; but, alas! It was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation was singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the graqy blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer; he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom” (Hawthorne 639). “Young Goodman Brown” is a short story by the author Nathanial Hawthorne. It is about a man of God that goes into the woods to meet the devil, and he gets initiated into the circle of evil. The passage is the last paragraph of the story and talks about the outcomes of Brown’s journey and the change the character goes through. Hawthorne use of word choice, diction, sentence structure, tone, and theme, effectively show the reader Brown’s change in character. Many literary devices in the story leave the reader with the feeling Hawthorne intended in the end. The author’s word choice is incredibly important in the final part of the short story because it leads the reader to Goodman Brown’s
Cited: Hawthorne, Nathanial. “ Young Goodman Brown.” The Norton Anthology Of Short Fiction. 7th Ed., Ronald Verlin Cassil, and Richard Bausch. New York: W Norton & Co, 2006. 639-648. Print.