A Closer Reading of Young Goodman BrownLast year, my senior year of high school, we were assigned to read “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. At the time, I hadn't read the story very closely and missed a lot of the symbolism. However, after reading it this semester, I enjoy it much more because it takes the reader through a rollercoaster of emotions and forces them to think introspectively. At first I felt suspense; his wife advises him not to go and start emergency fires in my mind. I could feel in my bones that something bad was going to happen. Once he began his "journey", the setting for this journey was once again quite frightening. “He had taken a dreary path, darkened by all the darkest trees of the forest, which scarcely parted to let the narrow path pass, and closed immediately behind” (376). I feared for young Goodman Brown and hoped that he would be able to return to his wife, aptly named Faith. The fact that her name was Faith seemed symbolic to me. I made a mental note to analyze after I finished reading why Hawthorne named her Faith. The surreal features of the path and the forest he found himself in only added to the suspense when he met his companion. Based on this traveler's description, I have come to assume that this was the future young Goodman Brown. I'm not really sure if this assumption is valid or not, but that was my first response. I think it's interesting that my first response is supernatural: a Back to the Future type response, where a person meets in the future. This story gave me a scary feeling, like a good horror story. The suspense of not knowing what was going to happen next, while expecting something dramatic, made my heart rate increase. Young Goodman Brown then meets his catechism teacher, which symbolizes a person he thought was very pious and would automatically go to heaven. It seemed to me that this story was about hypocrisy and that even the most seemingly pious people have skeletons in their closet. This was demonstrated again later when he finally arrived at the "altar" in the middle of the forest and saw the spectacle..