Ever since I was in High School, two of my favorite short stories have always been “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathanial Hawthorne. The plot of both of these stories keep the readers entertained and sitting on the edge of their seats. In the story Young Goodman Brown, a man takes a journey through the forest and appears to comes face to face with the devil himself. In this forest, he finds out that leaders in his church, his wife and even his father have become associated with the devil. He wakes up the next morning and was obviously changed by one event doubting the sincereity in everyone around him. It effected him for the rest of his life. It is hard to tell whether this was a dream or not, but it impacted him enough for him to think a certain way even into his old age. Young Goodman Brown always amazed me because the first time I read it was in 2001 during my 8th grade English class. Tomorrow is September 11th and will be eleven years since that tragic Tuesday morning. I know so many people who were changed by that day and were effected in the worst way. I know some people that turned away from God. I know some people that turned their back on the government. I even know some people who speak badly of our troops because that day reminds them of the time “our shields were not as strong as they should have been”. Now, this might be a blind or ignorant way of reacting to an event like this, but there is no doubt that the brain works in mysterious ways. Everytime I would hear a comment and think it was ignorant, I would then think about how much internal and psychological pain that person must be suffering in order to say something like that. The same goes when it comes to anazlyzing Young Goodman Brown. Whether that experience was a dream or if he really saw the devil inside all of these people that he considered to close to