Hawthorne had much more in mind than a mere outline of good and evil. His primary struggle in Young Goodman Brown appears to be less with faith vs. the faithless, but with the points in between these circumstances. The story shows more about the journey through between two rigidly defined circumstances than about good and evil. Hawthorne describes good and evil through heavy-handed metaphors and symbols. Symbolism such as his wife's name Faith, and the satanic communion he finds himself in the forest, he then describes Goodman Brown's inability to adapt his self-image to the hypocrisy he finds in himself. At the same time that sin is described as a seething, pervasive hypocrisy, it is also seen as an ordinary fact of living. Hawthorne forfeits simplicity of a message in order to concentrate more fully

Young Goodman Brown's painstaking journey into the forest exists in contrast to the simple dualism of good and evil. It is interesting that the journey is described in such detail. For example, clouds, trees, the shifting quality of the light, and the appearance of the fellow traveler as the journey continues to give the impression to underscore the inevitability and importance of the journey. Goodman Brown eventually finds himself betrayed by the easy categorization of good vs. evil, because he is unable to accept the possibility that goodness and sin are a part of human nature. Young Goodman Brown can't accommodate a world in which his "race of honest men and good Christians" could have taken the same path as he and returned "merrily after midnight".

Hawthorne appears to have a reaction to the Puritan morals of his era. There was no room in between the extremes of good and evil for individuals to function. Goodman Brown's metamorphosis into, a stern, sad, darkly meditative, distrustful, desperate man, seems to be one possible outcome of a strict Puritan standard which does not allow for a middle ground.

Hawthorne seems to say that good and evil as absolute circumstances are neither preferable nor realistic. His use of this character, who is unable to function within an absolute version of changing concepts, is more about the effects that exist in between these two circumstances, than it is about a statement on outlining a definition of "proper" human behavior.

Hawthorne's sense of irony and sarcasm is well illustrated in an episode like Goodman Brown's loss

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Approximate Word count = 1063
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)