In "Young Goodman Brown", Nathaniel Hawthorne shows how Goodman Brown can't be content with himself untill he has accepted that he has the potential to be both good and evil. His single-minded nature brought on by the religious dogma that he has grown up with, prevents him from seeing both the good and evil within himself. At this time in his journey, he can only see the good within himself. I believe that Brown goes into the woods after being troubled by the conflict within him over what is good and what is evil. I think that he falls asleep in the forest. His dream shows him the inner conflict of good and evil within him that he won't allow himself to face because of his inability to be open-minded. This conflict that he has between good and evil within himself has Goodman Brown being faced with the evil within himself as a test of his faith in the goodness within himself. At first- when the Elder Man describes Goodman's father and grandfather as being evil- he doesn't identify with the evil that he sees as being within him. Then he becomes overwhelmed by feelings of evil when he doesn't accept that both good and evil thoughts need to co-exist w

Brown's second encounter with the evil within him continues to show the deterioration of his journey to be open-minded and enlightened through being forced to see the evil within him. Brown is overcome with the stress of the "pious" and "ungodly" people within himself conflicting with each other. He doesn't realize that this is because he is still trying to decided whether he is good or evil instead of realizing that he's both. He begins to identify the evil within him by telling the darkness that they "may as well fear him as he fear you."(169), but still fails to see that his faith in the good within him can still exist with the bad within him also. Thus, he loses his faith in his goodness as, represented by his loss of Faith, there was a "voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations,"(169). So, he completly lets go of himself and lets his anger overwhelm him as the "fiend" within him " rages in the breast of man."(169) He is starting to believe that he is only capable of evil as he was "giving vent to an inspiration of horrid blasphemy,"(169). In desperation, his sense of the goodness within himself starts to deteriorate as he lets his anger make him feel capable of being violent like his father and grandfather. They had let their anger overwhelm them and "set fire to an Indian village"(166) and "lashed the Quaker woman"(166). He is now starting to become convinced that he is only capable of evil. "There is no good on earth, and sin is but a name."(169).

Thus, like how he viewed his grandfather and father as first being good and then being evil, he doesn't understand that, like himself, they have the capacity to be both good and evil. Instead, he automatically sees them as just being evil like he had automatically seen them as just being good before. He fails to understand that, like them, he

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Approximate Word count = 1223
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)