Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I can honestly say that I was a little confused by this story and didn’t understand what was going on. From what I got from the story, it was about a man called Goodman Brown trying to resist temptation of the devil from witches.

I know that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, but I’ve never actually read it. I know the story from what people have told me and from the movie Easy A. From what I’ve heard, it was an extremely boring and long book that was just too drawn out for the point of the book.

By the end of the story, I understood it. This story is like one of those books that really makes no sense until you finish it and then you’re like “ooh, now I get it”. The story was just this guy who had this temptation and went to a witch gathering and saw his wife there and then woke up in the street and thought it was a dream. Goodman didn’t want to sin but found it easy to lean toward it. In the end, he realized sin in the world, but instead of realizing sin and trying to fight against it, he accepted it and just condemned all his friends and family who sinned. He can’t appreciate his life at all because of the sin he sees in everyone else and takes his sadness to his grave and that is all that his family and friends remembered him as.

I think the point that Hawthorne is trying to make is that you have to accept that not all people are perfect. Everyone sins. If you only look at the sin in life then your life will be unhappy, but you should try to focus on the positive things and not dwell on sin.