Good Vs Evil In Goethe's Faust

Improved Essays
Julian Brown
Professor Brevik
World Literature
1 December 2016
T/TH
Goethe’s Faust One story from this semester that intrigued me the most was Goethe’s Faust There were so many things in the story that kept the reader engaged. There were themes in the play that keeps the reader thinking all throughout the story. I personally feel like this story was a head of its time because there are movies today with a similar storylines and ideas. Good vs Evil played a big part of this story. A man gets bored with his life and knowledge. He urges for more knowledge. He shows signs of obsession throughout the play of gaining knowledge. The greed is really what hurt him that leads him to concoct a poison that will take his life. Before he takes the potion
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He almost begs for God to forgive him his actions and his thoughts. A line from the play that shows that he was sorry for ever going through with it was ““My God, my God, look not so fierce to me!”. When he said that he was basically saying God even though I messed up and made this deal I do not mean it. He comes to realizes there can only be one God but his destiny is already set in stone from this point on. In my paper I will be focusing on these ideas. Is there a way out for Dr. Faustus? Could the outcome be anything else? In what central ways is this a play that is different from mediaeval morality plays? In majority of outcomes there is no way out of deals with the Devil. Once the deal is made it is usually set in stone. When making a deal with the devil you have to make sacrifices and Faust sacrifice was his soul. Faust got bored with being a scholar and wanted to venture out and do more. He wanted to gain more knowledge than any other human but to me I feel as if he didn’t change. He didn’t gain anything during his deal. Like the author Van der Laan, J. M. said in Faust 's Divided Self and Moral Inertia he agreed and believed …show more content…
I did not see any type of gain of knowledge or change besides the fact that he realized that he shouldn’t of did what he did. He wasn’t a humanistic hero who pushed the knowledge boundaries above to the unknown because he didn’t learn anything himself. Wasn’t any knowledge gained that would help him or anyone else so he couldn’t be classified as a hero at all. I was personally very disappointed because he really ultimately sold his soul for no reason at all. He was going to kill himself because he wasn’t satisfied with the knowledge he knew before but when given the chance to expand his knowledge and do better he didn’t. He used what was given to him for the wrong things. He used it to kill people and to seduce females which wasn’t his initial quest. So I am very disappointed in how he didn’t even do anything that he originally planned to do. He got side tracked by the evil around him and forgot to do well. That is how the evil started and kept on going. There was no stop to the evil. The plays allegory was good in my view because there were many hidden messages in the play. There was the message of in the matter of Good vs Evil good will always win because even though Faust did and went through all those things he ended up in heaven when God and the Angels came down and brought him up. I feel as if from the beginning God already knew that he was going to let Faust into heaven he just had to

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