Comparing Fear in Miller's Crucible and Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown comparison compare contrast essays

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Fear in The Crucible and Young Goodman Brown There are so many strange things that can trigger fear in one's mind. Things that first enter a reader's subconscious before striking thoughts of fright straight into the heart, causing adrenaline to rush and muscles to tense. Evil can be distributed in so many different ways. In the story "Young Goodman Brown", by Nathaniel Hawthorne, fear takes the shape as lies seeping through an eerie black forest late in the night. But in The Crucible, fear is disclosed not only in lies, but in false accusations. In "Young Goodman Brown", Goodman Brown finds himself leaving his wife, Faith, to meet someone at the edge of the forest late at night. At first, he is not quite sure why he feels uneasy. It may partly be because of the strange man with a cane which seems to writhe with a serpent-like appearance, or it may be because of the ominous woods he is trecking through. But the thing that makes Goodman Brown frightened the most is when he realizes that evil has penetrated its way into the only good he knows; his friends and acquaintances. He has also "lost his Faith", a double-meaning quote that was undoubtedly purposefully layed there by Hawthorne. This loss engraves in Goodman Brown a foreboding sense of lonliness. In The Crucible, lies take the shape of their container. Abagail Williams is undoubtedly the mastermind behind the fearful images imbedded in the minds of the ignorant townspeople. John Proctor, who committed adultry with Abagail, makes himself an easy target for Abagail's lies and torment, because he has that secret he cannot bear to let out. And soon, people are fearing, once again, for their lives. Afraid of being hanged by the very Puritan beliefs they worship. They begin to act paranoid toward one another and a crazed atmosphere inhibits the entire town. Fear takes so many forms. It can prey on a typical thing that most people are scared of, or create a perilous, threatening sense in the subconscious of a single being; the kind that makes the hair on the back of the neck stand at attention. Sometimes you do not even know why you feel frightened. Quickening your pace, hugging your stomach and darting glaces from side to side, are all instinct telling you you are in danger. These two stories make both fictional and non-fictional fear jump out of the page and into the turning wheels of the mind.

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