Why does the author leave it unclear whether Goodman Brown's experience is a dream or real in "Young Goodman Brown"? How is this noted in the story,...

Early
nineteenth-century writers were preoccupied with examining unusual mental states, the power of
imagination, and the borderline between illusion and reality. The literary preoccupation with
these concepts was symbiotic with developments in philosophy. Beginning especially with the
works of Immanuel Kant, and his successor (in some sense) Arthur Schopenhauer, philosophers
believed the external world, as we perceive it, is basically a projection of our minds,
different from actual, unmediated reality, or the "thing in itself" as Kant referred
to it.

Hawthorne is part of this literary trend that sees the outside world
as what could be an illusion, or sees the power of the human mind as such
that it can create its own reality. His stories generally possess a dreamlike quality even when
there is no explicit mention of the supernatural. What is important in " " is the
moral concept behind the story; the unanswerable question of literal reality versus dreams
or...