"Young Goodman Brown" begins when Faith, Brown's wife, asks him not to go on an "errand". Goodman Brown says to his "love and (my) Faith" that "this one night I must tarry away from thee." When he says his "love" and his "Faith", he is talking to his wife, but he is also talking to his "faith" to God. He is venturing into the woods to meet with the Devil, and by doing so, he leaves his unquestionable faith in God with his wife. He resolves that he will "cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven." This is an example of the excessive pride because he feels that he can sin and meet with the Devil because of this promise that he made to himself. There is a tremendous irony to this promise because when Goodman Brown comes back at dawn; he can no longer look at his wife

Goodman Brown then loses all of his inhibitions and begins to laugh insanely. He takes hold of the staff which causes him to seem to "fly along the forest-path". This image alludes to that of Adam and Eve being led out of the Garden of Eden as is Goodman Brown being led out of his utopia by the Devil's snakelike staff. Hawthorne at this point remarks about "the instinct that guides mortal man to evil". This is a direct statement from the author that he believes that man's natural inclination is to lean to evil than good. Goodman Brown had at this point lost his faith in God, therefore there was nothing restraining his instincts from moving towards evil because he had been lead out from his utopian image of society.

"Young Goodman Brown" ends with Brown returning to Salem at early dawn and looking around like a "bewildered man." He cannot believe that he is in the same place that he just the night before; because to him, Salem was no longer home. He felt like an outsider in a world of Devil worshippers and because his "basic means of order, his religious system, is absent, the society he was familiar with becomes nightmarish." (Shear 545) He comes back to the town "projecting his guilt onto those around him." (Tritt 114) Brown expresses his discomfort with his new surroundings and his excessive pride when he takes a child away from a blessing given by Goody Cloyse, his former Catechism teacher, as if he were taking the child "from the grasp of the fiend himself." His anger towards the community is exemplified when he sees Faith who is overwhelmed with excitement to see him and he looks "sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without a greeting." Brown cannot even stand to look at his wife with whom he was at the convert service with. He feels that even though he was at the Devil's service, he is still better than everyone else because of his excessive pride. Brown feels he can push his own faults on to others and look down at them rather than look at himself and resolve his own faults with himself.

Throughout the story, Brown lacks emotion as a normal person would have had. The closest Brown comes to showing an emotion is when "a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew." The dew on his cheek represents a tear that Brown is unable to produce because of his lack of emotion. Hawthorne shows that Brown has "no compassion for the weaknesses he sees in others, no remorse for his own sin, and no sorrow for his loss of faith." (Easterly 339) His lack of remorse and compassion "condemns him to an anguished life that is spiritually and emotionally dissociated." (Easterly 341) This scene is an example of how Goodman Brown chose to follow his head rather than his heart. Had Brown followed his heart, he may have still lived a good life. If he followed with his heart, he would have been able to sympathize with the community's weaknesses, but instead, he listened to his head and excommunicated himself from the community because he only thought of them as heathens.

Goodman Brown was devastated by the discovery that the potential for evil resides in everybody. The rest of his life is destroyed because of his inability to face this truth and live with it. The story, which may have been a dream, and not a real life event, planted the seed of doubt in Brown's mind which consequently cut him off from his fellow man and leaves him alone and depressed. His life ends alone and miserable because he was never able to look at himself and realize that what he beli

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Approximate Word count = 2390
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)