The Romantic Hero in Goethes Faust Essay -- Papers Essays Goethe Faus

The Romantic numbfish in Goethes FaustWorks Cited Not Included Long hailed as the drainage basin of Romantic literature, Goethes Faust uses the misadventures of its hitman to parallel the challenges that pervaded European ball club in the dynamic years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Faust is the archetypical Romantic hero because the transformation of his attitudes mirrors the larger transformation that was occurring in the society in which Goethe conceived the play. Fausts odyssey transports him from adherence to the tatty rationale of the Enlightenment to a passion for the pleasures that came to define the Romantic spirit. Faust not only expresses the moral contradictions and uncanny yearnings of a man in search of fulfillment, but also portrays the broader expectation of a society that was groping for meaning in a adult male where reason no longer sufficed as a catalyst for forgiving cultural life. The period of German Romanticism in which Goethe wrote Faust was plagued with the same intimate turmoil that Faust himself felt prior to making his deal with Mephisto. The destruction that the cut Revolution had exacted on the European consciousness was evident in the attitudes of the flock most touched by the tumult of the era lot who came to pull ahead that absolution was no longer a pertinent intellectual goal. The cold rationale of the Enlightenment was no longer adequate to explain the signification of life in a society where everything had so recently been sour upside down. Romanticism was the expression of this societys craving for answers and fulfillment. Everywhere, people embraced life passionately and lived as... ...emption, despite her sins, because all her crime was love (line 4501). Goethes Faust is a work in which a new type of hero emerges to satisfy the needs of a changing society. With Faust, Goethe succeeded in representing a microcosm of the tensi ons that attended the shift from rationalism to Romanticism. Complex and dynamic, Faust, like the great men of his era, is a hero whose most notable achievement is his transformation of the lives of others as wellhead as his own. In this respect, the lesson of the Romantic hero is comprised less of romance than of utility. undermentioned the trends of the Goethes contemporary evolving society, the means by which Faust succeeds in accomplishing his goals are more often than not selfish, brutal, and unethical. This is perhaps Goethes single greatest reflection on the in advance(p) nature of heroism.