Is his journey a dream vision telling him the truth about human nature? This story is a dream that tells the protagonist, Goodman Brown the truth about human nature. Set in Salem, Massachusetts

Unit 5 Individual Project 1

December 16, 2005

Is his journey a dream vision telling him the truth about human nature?  

This story is a dream that tells the protagonist, Goodman Brown the truth about human nature.  Set in Salem, Massachusetts on a dark and dreary night, Brown dreams that he journeys deep into his own mind and is exposed to the evil within, an evil that he cannot control. Inside the forest, Goodman is stunned in utter disbelief following the sight of the horrifically evil event. The event is warped beyond what he can comprehend, and "he could have well nigh sworn, that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke-wreath... but he had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought" (Hawthorne, 300). Such disillusion is nowhere near normal for the "good man" in society, but there is no escaping his unpardonable sin of going too far into the forest. "Goodman Brown cried out; and his cry was lost to his own ear, by its unison with the cry of the desert" (Hawthorne, 299). His reaction is only natural, but still it is that of a desperate and hopeless soul lost in the recesses of his own evil. Symbolically Goodman is denying all that he previously believed to be true, as his experience has irreversibly altered his way of thinking. "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave... they carved no hopeful verse upon his tomb-stone; for his dying hour was of gloom" (Hawthorne 302).   The dream bothered him for the rest of his life.