In both Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown and Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? , it is suggested that what is on the outside of a person does not matter because what is on the outside depends on what is on the inside. Although the two stories are very much different, they both share this same idea. The character is overcome by the illusion they are put through that their idea of reality changes and ultimately destroys what they used to see as normal or acceptable. Although the illusion breaks or in Hawthorne’s story, completely vanishes, the lasting effects have dire consequences for Young Goodman Brown and Connie.

In the short story, Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the main character Young Goodman Brown leaves his house late at night, to go on, what his wife calls his “journey.” Even before the events that unfold before him become strange and otherworldly, Young Goodman Brown sees a man “seated at the foot of an old tree.” Brown is expecting to see this man and immediately the reader finds out what this man looks like, “As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken for father and son. … But the only thing about him that could be fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent. This of course, must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.” Curiously, the old traveler and Brown appear to have many similarities and even stranger the traveler’s staff looks like a serpent in the dark. It must be noted that this is only the beginning of his journey into a dark illusion.

In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Connie doesn’t take a physical journey like Young Goodman Brown; however she notices that the illusion of Arnold Friend, the “18 year old” is falling apart. This illusion does not have the same supports as the one Young Goodman Brown is experiencing. Brown has put himself into an illusion that was formed through a combination of what he loves and what he fears, purely psychological. Connie is experiencing an illusion placed in front of her. She is not inside it; rather it manifests itself as a boy. “There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her.” This illusion is more realistic, being that Connie is not in an illusion, rather she is watching one. This is the major difference between Hawthorne’s story and Oates’. Being in a self induced illusion and waking up versus watching an unstable illusion fall apart into reality. Connie watches as this happens. “He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig, and brought down the stems behind his ears. Connie stared at him, another wave of dizziness and fear rising in her so that for a moment he wasn’t even in focus but was just a blur standing there against his gold car, and she had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was only half real.” Connie is able to see the shift in the illusion that tells her it’s not reality. This is another difference between Brown and Connie. Connie knows there is something deeper than the illusion, like seeing through the eyes of a mask.