Ambiguity in “Young Goodman Brown” Literary critics agree that there is considerable ambiguity in “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This essay aims to illustrate the previous statement and analyze the cause of this ambiguity. Henry James in Hawthorne, when talking about "Young Goodman Brown" comments on how imaginative it is, then mentions how allegorical Hawthorne is and how the allegory should be clearly expressed: I frankly confess that, in general, I have little fun, and that I never seemed, so to speak, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it risks ruining two good things: a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for much of the forced writing that has been inflicted on the world. The only cases in which it is bearable are when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager readiness. When it shows signs of being groped and fumbled, the necessary illusion is obviously absent and the failure complete. Then only the mechanism becomes visible and the purpose for which it works becomes a question of indifference (50). When one has to grope and fumble for the meaning of a story, then there is a "failure" in the work, Henry James says. This is unfortunately the case with “Young Goodman Brown”. It is so ambiguous on so many occasions in the story that a blurry image rather than a distinct image forms in the reader's mind. The Norton Anthology: American Literature states in "Nathaniel Hawthorne": Above all, his theme was curiosity about the pauses of other male and female beings. He has always been ambivalent about this issue......middle of paper......, Nathaniel. The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc.,1959.James, Henry. Hawthorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Lang, H.J. “How devious Hawthorne is.” In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by AN Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1965. Melville, Hermann. "Hawthorne and his mosses." In The Norton Anthology: American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. “Nathaniel Hawthorne.” The Norton Anthology: American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1995. Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The man, his stories and his love stories. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1989.