decision of experiencing a dream or reality. In "Young Goodman Brown" the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, creates a short story that displays a clearly abstracted allegory through the determination of the conscious and unconscious, composed of an enormous amount of symbolism interpreted from the setting, characters, and plot in the story.
To begin with, an allegory is "a form of extended metaphor in which objects persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy" (Bereng 1). In this case, the story's setting, characters, and plot represent abstract concepts such as faith, innocence, and evil. The story is allegorically centered around Young Goodman Brown. The characters' names, Goodman and Faith, obviously indicate how Hawthorne uses them as a religious allegory to stand up against the evil in the story.
It is no accident that such an experience should have taken place in a forest, for there is a long and extremely profound tradition in our literature for experiences of this
nature having taken place in forest settings. Psychologist Bruno
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