The ambiguity
of 's story, "," is the very key to his message. Just as in Hawthorne's ","
and his seminal novel, , the ambiguity of Puritanism is exposed. And, with
this exposure comes the theme of the hypocrisy of Puritanism in
which one never is certain whether one is "elect" or "condemned."
The main ambiguity of "Young Goodman Brown" arises from the question posed by
Hawthorne as narrator:
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in
the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
If the experience of witnessing the black mass is real, Brown loses faith in the
Puritan community because they are hypocrites. However, if he has merely dreamed "a wild
dream of a witch-meeting," then his loss of faith is of his own doing; it is because of the
depravity of his own soul, his own hypocrisy, and not because of the actions of others. At any
rate, as a Puritan, it is "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a
desperate man" that Brown becomes because of the uncertainty of Puritanism in which virtue
is only a dream. Blinded by his Puritan-Calvinistic conflict, becomes a hoary hypocrite who in
his own secret sins sees sins in others:
...they carved no
hopeful verse uon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.
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