Young Goodman Brown

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, the characters in the story bear much symbolic significance. The main character, Goodman Brown, is an immature man who feels the need to test his faith by taking a journey through the forest. His going into the woods, however, is a misguided test of his faith because his entire faith is founded too much in human frailty. He puts all of his beliefs in the way his Puritan …

…the actions of others. He thought that people were exempt from sin, and that they represented faith in all aspects. Brown represents how a person might not be aware that sin is present in everyone, and that good people also contain evil aspects. Being aware of sin can help a person better deal with life because isolating oneself from society and rejecting all the people who are sinners only leads to a lonely, miserable end.