Young Goodman Brown And Gimpel The Fool Analysis - 1320 Words

Young Goodman Brown and Gimpel the Fool comparative analysis To have faith means to have complete confidence or trust in someone or something. Faith can also be a specific system of religious beliefs, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† and â€Å"Gimpel the Fool† show how faith can differ from person to person. Brown, a Puritan, believes that one is either completely good or evil, there is no in-between. Good people do not do bad things, and vice versa. At first, he did not want anyone to see him meeting with the devil. He worried about what they might think or say seeing them together. When he decided not to go any further and sat alone in the forest, he could hear the voices of everyone in town, even his wife.†¦show more content†¦Brown now believes that there is no good in the world, because if the minister, deacon, the woman who taught him his catechism, were all connected with evil, then everyone must be. Gimpel is constantly made the fool at every chance someone has, however thi s does not cause him to lose his faith. He continues to provide his baked goods to his neighbors, and go along with their attempts at making a joke of him. His wife Elka is completely unfaithful, and uncaring, yet he still loves her, stays by her side, and provides for her. â€Å"She swore at me and cursed, and i couldn’t get enough of her.† No matter what she did, he still loved her and wanted to be with her. Out of the six children Elka gave birth to, none of them were fathered by Gimpel. This did not stop him from loving and caring for them as if they were his own. One evening the devil appears and tries to provoke Gimpel to seek revenge on the townsfolk by urinating in the dough. Elka came to him in a dream to warn him not to stray off his path or he will lose his place in paradise, so he decided not to go through with it. The devil, in Gimpel the fool, is described as having â€Å"a goatish beard and horns, long-toothed, and with a tail†. He did not appear human like, as Goodman Brown experienced. This is a way of separating people from evil, while it exists, not everyone is evil. People are capable of doing evil deeds, but this does not make them completely evil. Both stories contain symbolism tied to