Faith and Morality: An Examination of "Young Goodman Brown" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (PowerPoint presentation)
Includes speaker notes
Overview
I’ve chosen as my first artifact, "Young Goodman Brown,” published by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1835. The story follows the titular character down a forest road into his own psyche. Brown comes to an eventual loss of faith in himself, his wife, and humanity as a whole. My second artifact is Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Here, a serial killer called The Misfit catches up to a family just after a car accident. The Grandmother uses religious speech to plead for her life. Written by two writers who could not be more different and set nearly 150 years apart, the works of O’Connor and Hawthorne explore themes of faith and morality through the lens of social change at the time of their creation.
Grade: A