Edmund Husserl’s first important move about phenomenology is the“phenomenological reduction”which means that we should reduce the external world to the contents of our consciousness alone. However, Hans-Georg Gadamer holds the opin-ion that all interpretation of a past work consists in a dialogue between past and present (Eagleton, T. 2009:62). Gadamer’s famous theory is fusion of horizons which means that the event of understanding comes about when our own“horizon”of historical meanings and assumptions“fuses”with the“horizon”within which the work itself is placed. The present thesis takes Haw-thorne’s Young Goodman Brown as an example to illustrate different understandings when readers apply the two different theories.