Young Goodman Brown By Nathaniel Hawthorne
[48] “Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying – “Faith! Faith” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her, all through the wilderness.
[49] The cry of grief, rage, and terror, was yet piercing the night, when the unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the air, and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.
[50] “My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.”
These three passages really stood out to me because it was like the epitome of the definition of allegory to me.
The Webster Dictionary defines allegory as:
the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also : an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allegory
When he claims that he has lost his faith, it spoke to me as if he’s lost his faith in religion or faith in his beliefs. His name is Goodman Brown which is also symbolic that he is probably very faithful in his beliefs. When he realized he lost faith, the young man seized the pink ribbon. It was no longer Goodman.
I don’t think that Goodman Brown really underwent the activities that happened in the forest. It was all in the head of Goodman Brown where he eventually stopped believing and lost his faith.
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.”
This was the first paragraph of the story as well as the hook. Kafka started immediately with Gregor being transformed into a horrible vermin. It was so explicit that I had to stop myself at this first paragraph to just pull myself together because I vividly saw the brown belly and the armor-like back.
I have SO many questions based on just this one paragraph. Why was he turned into a vermin? Was it a dream? What happened?
This story just had me more and more confused as I read it. I kept trying to find clues that it was actually a metaphor for something else that may be happening in his life. Perhaps he is disabled and really can’t move around and work for the family. That is why the sister need to bring him food every day. Perhaps he just gave up in life and just laid around in his room LIKE a vermin, but not exactly a vermin. But the detailed description of his vermin-like behavior and characteristics made it very hard to continue with that belief.
Definitely an interesting read though!
