What do you make of the fact that the strange man in the woods in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" closely resembles Brown?

Goodman
Brown's journey into the dark night forest to confront evil is anfor confronting the evil within
his own soul. He has stuffed his own evil down and denied it, believing himself to be a good,
pious person, but his faith is largely a facade, even if he doesn't realize it. He is concerned
with surface appearances and how he appears to other people more than with his internal faith
life. He has little tolerance for the idea that people, including himself and his neighbors, are
inevitably a mix of good and evil. He has to "other" the evil in his own soul,
projecting it on to outside figures. That is why the "strange man," or devil, looks
like him. It is a representative of his own evil, but he displaces it to outside of himself. The
narrator states explicitly that in the woods, Goodman Brown's evil or devilish side is
released:

In truth, all through the haunted
forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. ... The fiend in
his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man.