English 251: Introduction to Literature

Study Guide

to

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"

 

Use your initial reading of the work to get your general bearings in it. 

• What is going on here?  Can you summarize the main action of the story in 3 sentences or less?

• Are there any words you need to look up in a dictionary?  (The editors provide a number of useful notes.  Still, there may be some elements of the work's vocabulary with which you are unfamiliar.  Use a good college desk dictionary.  A paperback version will be too skimpy for this purpose.)  Put your notes in this regard directly in the margins of the text.

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your first reading of the work.

Immediately upon finishing your first reading, re-read paragraphs 14-20.

• How is it, apparently, that Goodman Brown has come into the forest in the first place, to meet the stranger?  (There is a word whose meaning you need to be sure to get clear on here.  What is it, and what does it mean?)

• What is clever and sly about the way (in paragraph 16) the older person handles Brown's objection?

• How does this fit the way the narrator refers to the older person at just this moment?

• What is indicated by the phrase "inconsciously resuming his walk" in paragraph 17?

• What does the older person use the two examples he cites in paragraph 18 to prove?

• In paragraph 19, Brown reacts to this bit of history.  He undergoes two stages of reaction.

• What is the first?

• What is the second?

• How does it undercut the first?

• Now reconsider the two historical episodes brought forward in paragraph 18.  Do you notice any problems with the basis of Brown's second reaction? 

• Does Brown take note of this?

• Why?  What habits of mind, for instance, does this fact indicate?

• Supposing Brown had noticed what you have about the explanation he proceeds upon, what is the move Brown should have made at this point? 

• Given the fact that Brown accepts the explanation he does, what is the move he should make at this point?

• Does he do this? 

• What do we make of this fact?

In your second reading, focus on the internal structure of the story.

(1) The overall structure, of course, is narrative.  Using an erasible pencil, indicate in the margins of the texts the way you would outline the story:  what important divisions and sub-divisions do you notice?  Where do you locate the chief turning points?  There are more than one.  When you have located the several crises that constitute the rising action of the plot, the question arises:  which of these best qualifies as the central climax of the story as a whole?  Before deciding, jot down a list of criteria that might be relevant for deciding this.

 

(2) In certain smaller patches, the structure is basically descriptive.  Can you locate one of these?  What particular principles govern its internal organization?

 

(3) At a couple of places in the story we find one or another character saying something that exhibits discursive structure.  Point out one of these, and distinguish the elements of which it is composed.  What are the particular logical and explanatory relationships among these elements that make for discursive organization?

 

Do not read further in this Study Guide until you have completed your second reading of the work.

In your third reading, 

(4) Compile a list of things, actions and events in this story that strike you as possibly having symbolic significance.  For 3 of them, take a stab at formulating what they seem to represent?  What features of them in the narrative qualify them to represent this?

  Suggestions, comments and questions are welcome.  Please send them to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 2000 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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      This page last updated 21 April 2000.