Rebirth Short Story

The theme of rebirth is a widely-varying one. It can be a sad, dark rebirth or a beautiful and bright one. Whichever path it takes, this theme follows along a general guideline. It first shows how someone or something is in the beginning, an event that occurs, and how this event changes them. They are reborn into someone or something new. The short stories “Young Goodman Brown,” “Cathedral,” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” all share the theme of rebirth. While “Young Goodman Brown” is a dark rebirth, “Cathedral” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” have beautiful, bright rebirths. “Young Goodman Brown” follows the story of a devout religious man that undergoes an awful experience and becomes a dark, miserable man. “Cathedral” is about the rebirth of a narrow-minded, negative man into an enlightened, freed man. “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” is about a gloomy, desolate village being reborn into a place of beauty and hope.

Young Goodman Brown is a faithful, devout, religious man that plans on committing a sinful deed. Along his journey to commit this sin, the devil himself opens Brown’s eyes to the sin that surrounds him and is in everyone. This

The fact that the children are so comfortable doing so means they often find dead bodies washed up on their shores. This hints at the village’s gloomy, dark setting. The miserable atmosphere is further described with the following “The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desertlike cape.” When the villagers found the dead man’s body they didn’t need to clean off his mud-crusted face to know he wasn’t one of their own. They had so few people they “simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.” This is a lonesome, miserable village that gives off an air of