Young Goodman Brown And The Tell Tale Heart Analysis

I think most people can say that have fallen victim to anxiety at one point or another in their life so far. Some experience anxiety constantly throughout their day, every day, while others have only experienced true anxiety one time in their life, most people probably fall somewhere in between those two extremes on the spectrum. Anxiety comes in all different shapes and sizes and affects people in thousands of different ways, this carries over to anxiety in literary as well. There are both similarities and differences between Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, a lot of this has to do with the authors and their approaches. While Young Goodman Brown and The Tell Tale Heart seem to be very different in the way the characters explain their insanity and with the way they handle the anxiety, they are similar in the extensive detail the author uses to tell their story. Interestingly, the narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart has no problem telling the reader about his anxiety and admitting to his crime, but he is very quick to explain to the reader why it happened and why it is not a big deal. Anxiety plays an incredibly large role in the story and the narrator is very open with …show more content…
While going on his anxiety-ridden journey through the forest, Young Goodman Brown comes into contact with many people he once thought he could trust. One of these people is his wife, Faith. This really affects the man because she is his wife and he is so easy to lose trust in people at this point of the story. Brown, upon seeing Faith’s pink ribbon, says “My Faith is gone! There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is the world given” (Hawthorne 625). This man’s anxiety comes from within himself and he is not open about his anxiety, which is very different from the narrator in The Tell-Tale