Young Goodman Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" is a strange and unsettling story of a young man who travels through a wood overnight and allows his experience to change him forever. There are many themes in this short story, including the age-old theme of good and evil, but a close reading of the work can make the reader thing Brown's journey is a symbolic acting out of his own sinful nature and his secret inclination toward evil, and many critics feel that way too. Brown very well could have dreamed the entire sequence in the woods, because there is a fantasy and dreamlike quality to it, but under it all was his own guilt at the evil that dwelt inside him.

Young Goodman Brown is not an inherently evil character, but each person has some evil or hatred that lives within him or her. Many never allow it to show, but many feel guilty just knowing it is there, and that seems to be the message Hawthorne was sending with this story. Goodman Brown sees his father in the woods, he sees many of the townspeople, he sees his wife, and he sees the devil. While the situations...

Hawthorne writes, "His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown's approach and walked onward side by side with him" (Hawthorne 293). People, like this man who seems to be the devil, appear and disappear in the wood, and Brown seems to run into them all. The entire sequence in the forest seems like a dream, and seems unreal somehow, which makes the reader question if Brown really experienced his night in the forest.
At first, the reader simply wants to believe the night is a dream, but when Brown returns to his village, he is a changed man. Critic Derek Maus notes, "Hawthorne, like Poe, is focusing on the internal tumult of the character at hand and, as later developments in psychology would demonstrate, the effects of hallucination can be every bit as strong as actual occurrences if they are believed to be real" (Maus, 2002, p. 76). As the story continues,…