When I first read the story “Young Goodman Brown” By Nathaniel Hawthorne, I was extremely confused. I re-read many of the portions of the story because I wasn’t sure of what was happening throughout it. For instance, the part where Goodman Brown was in the forest and he began to hear voices, and it seemed as if it were out of thin air that the forest became extremely creepy and frightening, and alive. Many of the things seemed very unrealistic, until the story hints many things about religion, and the constant battle between faith and betrayal. He was already guilty of going forward into a journey which he knew was from the path of evil, against his real ideals, his believe in heaven, his faith. “Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fires, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a familiar one…” (Hawthorne 6) This quote is one of the portions of the story that seemed extremely supernatural, it confused me in many ways. He was indeed alone in the forest at midnight very frightened. In my opinion, he was clueless of what he was getting himself into when he decided to plan this journey. He was set up for a test, he was being watched, and he landed in the center of this ominous force.
