Saturday, 6 August 2011

Identify and discuss the effects of irony in "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The greatestin
Hawthorne's story "" is that Young Goodman Brown, named after a grandfather who was
"an old friend" of the devil who walks the younger man to the black mass, is not good
at all.  Shocked at the hypocrisy of everyone else--Deacon Gookin and Goody Cloyse--Goodman
Brown is far darker in his soul than any of the others, whose names he finds
ironic without realizing that his own is the most ironic
. For, it was "a
dream of evil omen for Young Goodman Brown."

A stern,
a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night
of that fearful dream.

After his night in the forest,
the irony is that Goodman Brown, the sanctimonious, self-righteous Puritan who
loses his faith more than any other
, perceives evil in all with which he comes
into contact--Faith, the minister, the congregation, his children and grandchildren.


 

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