Common Themes In Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown

Throughout the semester short stories were the main focus of English Composition II, and so a number of short stories were assigned for reading. Though each short story can be viewed as fundamentally different, each of the stories had something in common with one another. Each short story had theme(s) within them, which allowed the reader to better understand the story being told. A theme of a story is easy to point out in the story when it is given to you, or when it is as simple as black and white. However, with other stories discussing a theme for a story can be difficult because themes can be like opinions and almost every person has an opinion on a matter, but in this case almost every critic or reader has their own theme they can associate with the story. However, when there are multiple critics coming to a general agreement with some of the proposed themes to a short story then those themes become associated to the book. This can be expressed within the short story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This short story is about a puritan man who aptly shares the name of the title of the story ventures into the woods outside of Salem to go on a journey to which he describes as an “…evil purpose.” “Young Goodman Brown” by Hawthorne was first published in 1835, and so it has been read upon by many literary critics. Each one coming up with his/her own theme for …show more content…
Mental Instability is commonly discussed as a person or animal not being able to control their emotional state, for example a person’s mood. Mental instability also includes a person’s psychological state for a person’s thinking and their behavior in certain situations. Within this short story there are multiple scenes that lead many critics to believe the mental instability to be a theme of this short story. For example, Norman H. Hostetler