Goodman Brown is a Puritan in the ages of the Salem Witch Trials. A simple man with the beliefs of that time, (that evil is everywhere). A man who has faith in good and believes he can resist the forces of evil and temptation, he sets out to a quest in the dark wood where he shall try to refuse the temptations of the devil and return to the village before sunrise.

Right here we can see that already Goodman Brown has a sense of pride and presumption. This false pride and presumption is one of the factors of his fall. How? Goodman Brown already starts off the journey in a bad attitude, thinking he can overcome any evil and resist the strongest temptations.

“With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose…refusing all evil.”

Another fault of Goodman Brown is the fact that once he sense of pride is gone, he has now doubt, and he doubt leads him into thinking many things and then starts doubting his reasons for coming here. With his sense of pride now gone, he feels insecure and starts doubting whether he should be here. He feels awful in this place and wishes to leave immediately.

This makes Goodman feel strong until they meet his childhood catechism teacher and see her turned. This act discourages his confidence to a great degree. Right there he starts to doubt his confidence and starts to have doubts on this quest.

So in reality, all the devil did was instigate the evil side of Goodman Brown, which then led him to his own destruction. The devil in reality is just leaving little scenarios and making Goodman Brown make the choices.

Consider it like a stack of dominoes, all lined up perfectly. The dominoes represent his excessive pride and doubt and the devil being the person who arranges the dominoes to fall one after another, to knock them all down and the push behind the dominoes. The Devil starts off with a series of events and arranges them in such a way that it causes Brown to fall and lose his faith. All the Devil did was a little push and then, he let Goodman Brown destroy himself, thinking he could overcome anything and testing his faith.

Here is a controversial point, as no one knows if this was true if the Devil was telling the truth, but what matters is that the Devil purposely brought this up to confuse and corrupt Brown.

Some topics in this essay:
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