Examples Of Allegory In Young Goodman Brown

626 Words3 Pages
Thesis Statement: In Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne uses moral allegory to tell his readers how one must experience life in order to avoid temptations. Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, is truly an interesting one. It is full of layers of allegory that the author communicates very well to the readers. It starts off with a man named Goodman Brown who lives in Salem. He is saying goodbye to his young wife, Faith, who wears a pink ribbon, to go to a journey in the woods. She tried to stop him, but he chooses to continue with his plan and promises her that he’ll be back in the morning. The names alone in the story symbolize a young man and his faith in God. He decides to part with his faith in God to carry on with his journey to the unknown. While on his journey, he feels guilty for leaving his wife behind, thinking that she might have…show more content…
Here, Goodman is firm with his decision to just go with the devil and possibly do something bad, but in the end of it, he still wants to go back home to his wife, to his faith. In their journey through the forest, Goodman is surprised to sees familiar people going towards the same place he’s going with the old man. The author is showing us that all people sin, no matter how they may appear on the outside. The first person he sees is a woman named Goody Cloyse, his childhood religious instructor, who turns out to be a witch. He cannot believe that she would be out in the dark forest and know the devil for he looks up to her. Further on, he also sees the minister and deacon from his village. As he finds himself in disbelief, he then find his wife’s pink ribbon and hears her voice. He realizes that she is going to be initiated into the devil’s black mass. Goodman cries out to his wife to resist evil, but instantly finds himself alone in the dark
Open Document