ENG 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Young Goodman Brown, Puritans, General Idea
19 Jan 2018
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Document Summary
Focusing on the di erence between plot and theme. Plot: is what happens in a narrative text. Won"t be tested on de nitions but you need to understand them. Theme: the general idea or meaning of a text; or the moral of a story. A story"s theme or meaning is usually expressed through the plot. In young goodman brown, we don"t really know what happens. Brown himself doesn"t really know what happens, whether it was a dream or not. For the rest of his life, brown is tortured by the experience he had in the forest whether it was a dream or a supernatural experience. Ultimately we only have limited knowledge of what happens or that this ambiguity is the plot. Ambiguity: the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. If the ambiguity is part of the plot, the text would be ambiguous as well as seeping into the actual story.
