How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #7
"My Faith is gone!" cried he, after one stupefied moment. "There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given."
And here we have it: innocence, lost. But notice that Goodman Brown hasn't actually done anything evil. Instead, he just imagines that everyone around him is doing evil. That almost seems worse to us.
Quote #8
And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to fly along the forest path, rather than to walk or run. […] sometimes, the wind tolled like a distant church-bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors. (50-51)
Oh boy, talk about a freaky psychotic break. You know those horror movies where it turns out that the hero is the bad guy? Hawthorne apparently invented them.
Quote #9
"Lo! there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. "Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race!" (65-66)
Young Goodman Brown and Faith are just about to be brought into the "communion" of evil. But are they? Is it a choice they have to make—or is the loss of innocence something that the world inflicts on all of us?