Importance of Character – Character – Young Goodman Brown Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Importance of Character
American Gothic traditions are the stories that feed the thrill for “things that go bump in the night.” The purpose of most is to provide the reader, page after page, one ghastly thrill after another. These stories have many similarities throughout its stories including darkness within its characters. Characters like Young Goodman Brown written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Narrator in the story The Tell-Tale Heart written by Edgar Allan Poe are two characters have fall into this category.
Young Goodman Brown heads into the dark forest at night. Here he struggles with his faith, and his ability to resist evil. I feel like he had a battle within him to determine the difference between good from evil, which made him quickly, judge anything and everything that came his way. I think he went crazy from spending time in the forest. One of his friends, Goody Cloyse met up with Young Goodman Brown in the forest, which made him quick to judge her as to why she was out so late at night. He also discovered that she could also be a witch, and wondered how someone like that could think that they could go to Heaven. I feel like he became a very sad, judgmental, and distrustful person due to his encounter in the forest.
However, Young Goodman Brown wakes in the forest to realize that the witch meeting he encountered was only a dream, but this does not stop him from being naïve. Even though he realizes it was just a dream, he is still the same judgmental and distrustful person that he was while he was in the forest. He also begins to not trust his own wife, which isn’t fair to her because she did nothing to him. Altogether, I just think that he was a naïve young man entering the forest, and became even more naïve, judgmental, and distrustful after he left the forest.
The Narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart was a crazy character to read about. He acted crazy from beginning to end. He had something against a little old man that not even he could explain, other than he didn’t like the way that his eye, which he was blind out of, would just stare at him “like a vulture.” I think that his character just let his thoughts get the best of him, and he just decided to kill the old man. I also think that he was very judgmental toward the “evil” eye. He was also a very patient man because he waited so long to complete his quest when the old man heard him enter his room. I also