Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Richard Abcarian (essay date 1966)

Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne - Richard Abcarian (essay date 1966)

Richard Abcarian (essay date 1966)

SOURCE: "The Ending of 'Young Goodman Brown'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. III, No. 3, Spring, 1966, pp. 343-45.

[In the following essay, Abcarian contradicts previous critics who state that the ending of Hawthorne's tale is anticlimactic and redundant]

"Young Goodman Brown" is certainly one of Hawthorne's greatest stories and arguably one of the finest short stories ever written. With the economy of genius, Hawthorne dramatizes the discovery by a young and good man "that all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnelhouse within . . ." [Herman Melville, Moby Dick] and the consequences of that discovery. The story is rich and ambiguous enough to have elicited a good deal of critical comment and controversy. However various the approaches and divergent the interpretations, the most illuminating and useful studies have maintained a...

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