If Brown imagined it all, he is ruining not only his own life and happiness, and that of his wife, for no reason. Instead, he wishes us to think about what difference it would make. However, Hawthorne knows that we cannot answer it. Towards the end of the story, Hawthorne’s narrator asks, ‘Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?’ and this directly invites readers to consider what the answer might be. The key question – whether Goodman Brown really witnessed all of the supposedly upstanding members of his village engaging in a Black Mass in the forest, or whether he merely dreamt it – is one which we cannot definitively answer, so artfully did Hawthorne construct his tale so that it can be interpreted in these two very different ways. Although he may recoil from the scale of sin he sees in evidence in the woodland clearing, his faith has been touched by what he has witnessed.
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