The Sorrows Of Young Werther Analysis

Question 9: “The servant delivered the pistols, and Werther took them from him enraptured on hearing that it was Lotte who gave them to him” (Goethe 131). Discuss. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, intimately follows the life and love of the titular character and culminates in his suicide. Though it is ultimately Werther who pulls the trigger, ending his own life, who is actually responsible for the suicide? Two of the most plausible candidates are Werther and/or Lotte, but the novel ultimately asserts that Werther’s suicide is the culmination of an affliction ultimately out of all the characters’ controls. At times, The Sorrows of Young Werther, appears to present Lotte as Werther’s pseudo-murderer. She …show more content…
Through the parallel of the prisoner, Goethe shows that had Werther not killed himself, he would have been forced to murder Lotte and then been arrested and likely killed for his actions, if he did not commit suicide while awaiting trial. “He was so able to see things through the man’s eyes,” (109) because this is his alternate future. This incident shows that death and an unhappy remainder of life are inevitable for Werther regardless of whether or not he kills himself because either he will die by his own hand, so to speak, or he will watch himself turn on the person he loves and then be executed as punishment. The very inescapability of the situation further proves that the situation must be out of the control of the characters, especially those of Werther and …show more content…
He clearly articulates the idea that his death is necessitated by a force beyond his control in his letter on the twelfth of December. He claims to be “possessed of an evil demon” (111) that sometimes “takes a hold of [him]” (111). In this instant, Werther is able to express the externalization of his preceding madness and upcoming death. He describes this possession as an “unfamiliar tumult within” (111) which emphasizes the foreignness of these feelings and how they do not and cannot originate within himself as he has been experiencing them for over a year and they are still unfamiliar. Because the nature of these feelings is so foreign, they could not have possible originated from within Werther, and thus, as all other causes have been ruled out, must come as an uncontrollable result of his situation. In his letter on the fourteenth of December, Werther writes, “I alarm myself” (112) with reference to his “reprehensible desires” (112) towards Lotte. It further proves that his feelings must originate from outside himself. Ultimately there is no one in the novel that can rightfully be blamed for Werther’s suicide. The responsibility cannot reside solely in Werther or Lotte, nor can it be split between them in any way; the death is simultaneously the fault of everyone and no one. Goethe presents Werther’s suicide as the only possible