Instead, sin in this story has a more basic and generalized meaning that refers to all of humanity by virtue of being human. It is not so simple as to suggest that because all the people in the village are at the witches' sabbath they are therefore cruel and wicked people as individuals. Although we know that the story has something to do with the discovery of the concept of evil and the related concepts of guilt and sin, the work never makes it quite clear what sin is or what evil is. The theme of Hawthorne's tale is not so straightforward as it may appear at first glance.

This inconclusiveness is not the result of Hawthorne's faulty control of his story but rather an indication of an important transition point in the development of short fiction in the nineteenth century, when allegorical conventions began to be displaced by realistic ones. Brown seems to be an as-if-real character with a mind of his own. His questioning of the journey and his struggles against it, however, suggest a realistic open-endedness. It seems as though Goodman Brown's journey into the forest is ritually predestined, that he is an allegorical figure who has no free will to act in any way other than what the allegorical nature of the story determines for him.

But even as Hawthorne suggests that there is some uncertainty about whether Goodman Brown actually experienced his confrontation with the devil or only dreamed it, there is a more basic ambiguity underlying the relationship between realism and allegory in this tale. 'Young Goodman Brown,' Nathaniel Hawthorne's well-known tale of a young man's initiation into the nature of evil, is usually seen as a classic example of the author's allegorical method.

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