Loss of Faith in Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown Essay -- Young Goodma

Loss of Faith in Young Goodman Br declare In the Bible, God commands Moses to go up Mount Sinai to receive divine instruction. When he comes back, his people, the Israelites, have gone crazy. They have forgotten Moses, and forgotten their God. They form their own god, a halcyon calf, and build an altar. They even had a festival for the golden calf. Afterward they sat bundle to eat and drink and sat down to indulge in revelry (Exodus 326). Moses then went down the volume and got so angry that he smashed the tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. The Israelites woolly-headed faith because they could not see the God they were worshipping, so they forgot him and began worshipping a fictive idol. The Israelites are not very different from modern man. In his myopic story, Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne shows why man loses faith. Man loses faith because of pride, weakness, and erroneous values. self-exaltation causes man to lose faith. Often man tries to handle situations on his own. He seeks to contend with evil by himself. In Young Goodman Brown, the title citation becomes crazy and confronts evil, Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come vex himself And here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you (Hawthorne 324). Goodman Brown feels that he will be the demise of sin. He assumes that he is strong enough to conquer it all single-handedly. Pride in like manner prevents man from realizing his own imperfections. When wandering in the wilderness, Young Goodman Brown says, A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at nightfall (Hawthorne 320). The wilderness symbolizes any sinful place. Young Goodman Brown fails to relieve oneself that the only reason... ...ke Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who cast off the beliefs of post World War I America. Many of these thinkers moved to Paris and try to make find heart in their meaningless lives. They would throw wild parties, drink excessively, and have black love affairs (Kaiser). They gained prominent places in the twentieth century because of their weird alienation. Loss of faith may cause fame and fortune, as it did for the lost generation, and with this loss came inescapable emptiness. Works Cited Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown. Perrines Literature Structure, Sound, and Sense. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Harcourt College Publishers citadel Worth, 2002. 316-328. Kaiser, Nancy. The Lost Generation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 29 October 2001. < http//ils.unc.edu/kaisn/pathfind.html>