GOODMAN BROWN
...r and grandfather. Already, this tells you that the man would be very old, maybe even too old to be alive if he were really human. He tells Goodman Brown how he helped his grandfather lash a Quaker woman through the streets of Salem, and how he helped his father set fire to an Indian village during the King Philip’s War. Any man who has been around for so long, with such devilish ways, could only be the devil himself. The Devil presented himself in Goodman Brown’s dream to try and make him lose his faith. Now whether these stories were true or not is unsure. The devil could have been telling him the truth about his father and grandfather, or he could just have been lying, to convince Goodman Brown that it was okay to feel the way he was feeling. The devil wants Goodman Brown to lose his faith, and entered his dream to do this. Faith is the wife of Goodman Brown. In the beginning of the story, he is leaving her to run an errand. She tells him not to go, that she is troubled by her own thoughts and dreams, so troubled that she is sometimes of afraid of herself. Faith is his wife of three months, and in his dream she is wearing pink ribbons in her hair. He leaves her anyways, tells her to go to bed, that he will return at sunrise. In this story, Faith obviously represents his own faith. His faith in God, his faith in people, his faith in his wife. While on his journey through the forest that night, after refusing to go on any farther with the devil, Goodman Brown finds one of Faith’s pink ribbons. It flutters down through the air, and gets caught on the branch of a tree. As he grabs it off the tree branch, he realizes he is losing his faith, but in his dream noticed it as losing Faith, his wife. At the end of the story, when he returns from the forest, he is greeted by his wife Faith on the street. She still has both of her pink ribbons in her hair. One of her ribbons would not have fallen from absolutely nothing through the air, and if this really had happened, she would not still have both of her ribbons in her hair. This is a major representation that Goodman Brown really was dreaming that night in the forest. While in the forest, and on his journey with the devil, Goodman Brown has encounters with a few women, all of which he knew from his village. While he is speaking to these women, it is mentioned that he can only hear their voices, but cannot see the women themselves. He only knows who these women are by recognizing the voices he is hearing. If this journey were reality, he would have been able to see the women. That night, Goodman...