Young Goodman Brown Vs. a Tell-Tale Heart

The two characters I picked to compare for this project is Young Goodman Brown from the story Young Goodman Brown written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the narrator in the story The Tell-Tale Heart written by Edgar Allan Poe. I chose these two stories because they were the ones that really captured my attention when I first read them. Young Goodman Brown and the Narrator have many similarities within their characteristics, which shows that the American Gothic tradition has many similarities throughout its stories including darkness within its characters.

Young Goodman Brown heads into the dark forest at night. Here he struggles with his faith, and his ability to resist evil. I feel like YGB had a battle within him to determine good from evil, which made him quick to judge anything and everything that came his way. I think that he honestly went crazy from being in the forest. One of his friends, Goody Cloyse met up with YGB in the forest, which made him quick to judge her as to why she was out so late at night. He also discovered that she could also be a witch, and wondered how someone like that could think that they could go to Heaven. I feel like YGB becomes a very sad, judgmental, and distrustful person due to his encounter in the forest. However, Young Goodman Brown wakes in the forest to realize that the witch meeting he encountered was only a dream, but this does not stop him from being naïve. Even though he realizes it was just a dream, he is still the same judgmental and distrustful person that he was while he was in the forest. He also begins to not trust his own wife, which isn't fair to her because she did nothing to him. Altogether I just think that YGB was a naïve young man entering the forest, and became even more naïve, judgmental, and distrustful after he left the forest.

The Narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart was a crazy character to read about. He acted crazy from beginning to end. He had something against a little old man that not even he could explain, other than he didn't like the way that his eye, which he was blind out of, would just stare at him "like a vulture." I think that his character just let his thoughts get the best of him, and he just decided to kill the old man. I also think that he was very judgmental toward the "evil" eye. He was also a very patient man because he waited so long to complete his quest when the old man heard him enter his room. I also think that he was very intelligent because the way he killed him left no trace of blood anywhere, and he hid him under his own floor boards. The Narrator was also a very confident person, because he knew that he could kill this little old man and get away with it. After he smothered the old man with his own mattress, he cut him up and hid his pieces underneath the floor boards, but soon after the police arrived at the house. The Narrator was somewhat scared, but he knew the police wouldn't find any trace of the