Young Goodman Brown

Young Goodman Brown "'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 angelis nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. "Depending on one another's hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now ye are undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome, again, my children, to …

…This is yet another difficult and unyielding paradox, with which Hawthorne seems ultimately concerned. Hawthorne seems to say that good and evil as absolute states are neither preferable nor realistic. His use of this character, who is unable to function within an immutable version of ultimately mutable concepts, is more about the things that exist in between these two states than it is about a definitive statement on outlining a definition of "proper" human behavior.