The ambiguity of Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, "Young Goodman Brown," is the very key to his message. Just as in Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," and his seminal novel, The Scarlet Letter, the ambiguity of Puritanism is exposed. And, with this exposure comes the theme of the hypocrisy of Puritanism in which one never is certain whether one is "elect" or "condemned."
The main ambiguity of "Young Goodman Brown" arises from the question posed by Hawthorne as narrator:
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting?
If the experience of witnessing the black mass is real, Brown loses faith in the Puritan community because they are hypocrites. However, if he has merely dreamed "a wild dream of a witch-meeting," then his loss of faith is of his own doing; it is because of the depravity of his own soul, his own hypocrisy, and not because of the actions of others. At any rate, as a Puritan, it is "a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man" that Brown becomes because of the uncertainty of Puritanism in which virtue is only a dream. Blinded by his Puritan-Calvinistic conflict, becomes a hoary hypocrite who in his own secret sins sees sins in others:
...they carved no hopeful verse uon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.
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