Religious Faith And Belief In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown
1
In Hawthorne 's essay “Young Goodman Brown”, does it matter whether or not the protagonist, Goodman
Brown, dreamt the events in the story?
The idea and drive behind religious faith and belief is a concept consistently explored in Young Goodman
Brown (YGB). The story explores Brown 's journey in a single night which inexplicably ends with a tarnished perspective on religious faith as portrayed by his fellow villagers. Brown himself grows to be disillusioned on faith but the events leading up to this shift however, is ambiguous at best, with the debate mostly centred towards the notion that Brown merely dreamt the events, resulting in an unfair and biased outcome in terms of his sentiment towards the villagers and his own belief. At the same time, there is also concern for the dream 's operating capacity, if it was a catalyst or a trigger. Regardless of the either/or situations, we are compelled to believe that the dream matters very little, if at all. However, through this essay, the focus would be on how the dream is merely a catalyst and not a trigger which ultimately results in Brown undergoing a shift in his perspective and becoming disillusioned with the concept of religious faith, a path he was already on even without the dream happening.
At the beginning of the story, we are introduced to Brown leaving Faith, his wife. Interestingly, “...my Faith, of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee” seems to be a pun on Faith, meaning both his
wife
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