"Young Goodman Brown"un análisis simbólico-narrativo

Resumen

This paper examines "Young Goodman Brown" in a definite attempt to determine in depth Hawthorne's literary strategies and the narrative mechanisms involved in this tale. From a moral and religious point of view, this story is an allegory of Goodman Brown's loss of Faith not only in God, but also in human nature. Hawthorne builds the plot on an archetypical structure of quest: a journey of exile and return through the evil wilderness of the night, where the hero suffers a rite of initiation into witchcraft (witches' sabbath) that is developed under the influence of a dream allegory. In this wilderness an ambiguous death and rebirth to a life of desperation takes place. I try to analyse the different stages and symbols of the initiation rite and to emphasize the importance of the biblical, historical and literary sources involved in this tale from the point of view of intertextuality.