The Devil in Disguise: Comparing and Contrasting the Devil Figure in "Where Are You Going; Where Have You Been?" "The Man in the Black Suit" and "Young Goodman Brown"

During the early 1700s, a traveler met a man in the Massachusetts forest. However, this was no mortal man, but the devil. “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Devil and Tom Walker,” two short stories, both start out in this way. Washington Irving wrote the latter in 1824, which tells how Tom Walker profited through working for the devil. In 1835, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Young Goodman Brown,” which describes Goodman Brown’s woodland encounter with the Devil. The two stories share specific ideas regarding the devil, overpowering minor deviations between each other.

In “The Devil and Tom Walker” they use literary archetypes that represents universal patterns of human behavior or commonly-held beliefs. This story takes place in 1727 in Boston Massachusetts. There are three main characters who are very similar but a little different. Tom Walker is small, greedy, overly confident, and miserly. Tom Walker’s wife Mrs. Walker is selfish, verbally abusive towards Tom, and she is known as a termagant because she nags and complains all of the time. Last but not least old scratch has many other names that have been given to him by his personality, but he is the devil.

“I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love” (Marilyn Monroe). Joyce Carol Oates is the author of the realistic allegory story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. The story is about a young girl named Connie, who likes seeking attention from men, as a distraction from her problems at home. She meets a man named Arnold Friend, he goes after Connie, claiming he has to take her for a ride, but it is obvious he wants to do other things. Because of this character’s actions, it is determined that he is a representation of the devil. Through plot, characterization, and dialogue, Oates successfully portrays Arnold Friend as a symbolic Satan.

The man that Goodman Brown encountered on his journey symbolized the devil in the text which strongly influenced him to just about give up his faith in God. The Devil disguised as a “fellow traveler” (266) tried to influence Goodman Brown by

The stories analyze the devil’s connection with the fallenness of humankind. Both in “The Devil and Tom Walker” and “Young Goodman Brown,” the devil snatches the protagonists’ soul, though the victim first decides whether to turn to him, because the devil cannot force himself upon the unfortunate. Yet, their depravity causes Tom Walker and Goodman Brown to succumb to the

In the story “Where are you Going, Where Have you been?” Joyce Carol Oates tells us about a fifteen year old girl named Connie. Connie is confronted by a young man who is trying to persuade her to take a ride with him. He introduces himself as Arnold Friend and kindly asks her to come with him but she refused. He then threatens Connie and her family. She is then forced outside and leaves with Arnold Friend. Arnold Friend clearly symbolizes the devil through his physical traits, his knowledge of Connie, and his power over her kind of like he was hypnotizing her to go with him.

The Bible is another book that allusions are commonly made to. Foster illuminates the fact that, “The devil, as the old

In “Where are You Going, Where Have you Been?” Joyce Carol Oates uses an allegorical figure of evil to illustrate the theme of temptation. Oates alludes to hell through the character Arnold Friend, as the devil, and his victim Connie, who invites him in by committing the sin of vanity.

In “The Devil and Tom Walker,” the devil carries pious Tom away on his great black horse, and in “Young Goodman Brown,” all the village’s citizens, including Goody Cloyse, Goodman Brown, and his wife willingly gather at a worship service for the devil, which ruins the remainder of Brown’s life so that “when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave...they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.” The corruptness of man’s sinful nature made it possible for the devil to capture the souls of Tom Walker and Goodman Brown.

     The main focus of the story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is the triumph of evil over good. A supposedly good man is tempted by evil and allows himself to be converted into a man of evil. This is much like the situation that arises in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, where two people are tempted to sin and give in thus submitting themselves to the power of the devil. In this novel, the area where the devil resides is strictly parallel to that in “Young Goodman Brown”.

Starting with “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Connie is viewed by the readers as being in this dreamlike state, which is simply used as a nightmare to show Connie the reality of her life when girls decide they want to grow up too fast. Hence, the entire experience with Arnold Friend was just Connie’s subconscious demonstrating to her what her “big girl” attitude and behavior could result in, and how it could change her life. Furthermore, with the story not having a definitive ending, it also shows that this is not reality for Connie, but just a pure glimpse of her path and future. Similarly, in “Young Goodman Brown,” Brown is also dreaming of his “what if” future. Throughout the story, people are magically appearing and disappearing. For example, when Brown talks about seeing Goody Cloyse. The story gives no indication that she acknowledges him being in the forest, yet they have known each other since he was a boy. As soon as the devil

In the two stories Goodman Brown and The Man in the Black Suit, the writer's Nathaniel Hawthorne and Stephen King portray the features of appearance, language, and behavior about the devils that occur. These features occur throughout the stories to give evidence and detail about characterization and how he tries and pursues the people to be a servant of him. The writers also evoke the effect of evil on innocence. The two stories show the two different outcomes of what path Brown and Gary choose to go down upon. The presence of evil on the innocent can be an experience of being a servant for him or not believing him and still find the good in everyday.

The devil has long been associated with evil, and containing a negative connotation. Connie continuously acts promiscuously, resulting in the devil appearing at her house. Connie, however, when first meeting Arnold is unphased by the potential harm and acts in a flirtatious manner to grab his attention. In the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, she uses symbolism to to represent that Arnold Friend is the devil.

In the stories “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” and “Young Goodman Brown,” there is a common theme that the characters are in a dreamlike state with a subconscious presence of the devil. Not only do they share these common themes, they also reveal the meaning of the story, which is each characters’ coming-of-age journey and crossing boundaries. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is about a girl named Connie, who wants to grow up fast and flirts with the temptation that comes with being an adult. “Young Goodman Brown” follows a man, Goodman Brown, on a night journey into the forest to meet with a stranger, even at his wife’s protest. These characters are in a dreamlike state and their interactions with the devil gives them a glimpse of how their actions will play out in the future and the consequences they will suffer when those boundaries are crossed. With the theme of being tempted by the devil, in Connie’s case growing up fast and in Goodman Brown’s case a communion in the woods, both characters face significant changes in their outlooks on life.

Both authors describe the devil similarly. Craftily, the devil disguises himself as a mostly normal-looking individual in both stories. Because of this, a passerby would not hesitate to talk to him. However, the devil fails to hide some subtle clues to his identity. In “Young Goodman Brown,” “the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wiggle itself like a living serpent,” (Hawthorne 8-9). In “The Devil and Tom Walker,” the man’s appearance indicates the devil because “his face was neither black nor copper-color, but swarthy, and dingy and begrimed with soot, as if he had been accustomed to toil among fires and forges,” (Irving 4). The two stories continually refer to the devil as a specific color: grey in “Young Goodman Brown,” and