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  • Essay / Multiple Perspectives on Expulsion

    Satan's StorySay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay I169: But see the angry victor remembered 170: His ministers of vengeance and pursuit 171: Return to heaven's gates: the sulfurous hail 172: Shooting after us in the storm, the blast spread 173: The fiery momentum that issues from the precipice 174: From the sky received us falling and the thunder, 175: Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage, 176: Perhaps he exhausted his arrows and now ceases177: To howl across the vast and boundless depths. Tale of Chaos II992: Made head against the king of heaven, though overthrown.993: I saw and heard, for an army so numerous 994: I did not flee in silence through the frightened depths 995: With ruin upon ruin, rout upon rout, 996: Confusion worse confused; and the gates of heaven997: Poured out by millions its victorious bands998: Pursuing. Me, on my borders here999: Keep my residence; if all I can, I will serve,1000: This little that remains thus to defend1001: encroached again through our burning intestines1002: Weakening of the scepter of old Night: first hell1003: Your dungeon lies far below; 1004: Now, lately, heaven and earth, another world 1005: Suspended above my kingdom, bound by a golden chain 1006: On that side the sky from which your legions have fallen: Story of narrator III 390: He is the heaven of heavens and all the powers that are there 391: By you created and by you overthrown 392: The aspiring dominations: you that day 393: The terrible thunder of your Father does not has not spared,394: Nor stopped the wheels of your fiery chariot, which trembled395: The eternal framework of heaven, while above the necks396: You have driven out helpless warring angels.397: Returns from the pursuit of your powers with great acclamations398: You alone exalted, Son of your Fathers could,399: To execute fierce vengeance on his enemies, the account of Raphael VI856: He raised up the fallen, and like a flock857: Of goats or fearful flocks pressed together858: Brought them before him thunderstruck, pursued 859: With terrors and fury to the limits 860: And the crystal wall of heaven, which opened wide, 861: Rolled inwards, and a spacious breach discovered 862 : In the depths of waste; the monstrous spectacle863: Struck them back with horror, but much worse864: pushed them backwards; they threw themselves headlong865: From the edge of heaven, eternal wrath866: Burned after them to the bottomless pit.867: Hell heard the unbearable noise, hell saw868: The sky was ruined from the sky and would have fled869: Frightened ; but strict fate had sunk too deep870: Its dark foundations, and too quickly had become bound.871: Nine days they fell; the confused Chaos roared,872: And felt a confusion tenfold in their fall873: Through its wild anarchy, a rout so enormous874: Encumbered it with ruin: hell at last875: The yawn received them whole, and closed on them, 876: Hell their suitable habitation strewn with pitfalls. with fire 877: Inextinguishable, the house of misfortune and pain. 878: The unburdened sky rejoiced and soon repaired 879: Its wall breach, returning from whence it rolled. 880: Sole winner of the expulsion of his enemies There are four versions of the expulsion of the rebellious angels to Paradise Lost. Satan and Chaos, two fallen sources, tell the first two versions while the narrator and Raphael, two transcendent sources, tell the last two versions. By revising the first two versions in light of the last two, we discover discrepanciesrevealing between the stories of pairs of opposing narrators. These divergences force us to confront the problem of memory. Satan and Chaos repress, displace, and forget the memories of the traumatic expulsion because they cannot deal with the guilt and shame of their defeat. Through these psychological defense mechanisms, they refuse to recognize their metaphysical role in the universe as tragic figures doomed to downfall. While the reader initially shares the erroneous perceptions of the fallen characters, the narrator and Raphael correct the errors of Satan and Chaos and lead the reader to redemption. The reader can then discern the hidden object behind the repression and anxieties of Satan and Chaos; a Miltonic counterplot of creation, which Geoffrey Hartman characterizes as "a second plot, expressed simultaneously with the first." This counterplot is a "hidden presence" that dominates the story by placing Satan's destruction within the larger divine design of creation. By rejecting the skewed perspectives of the fallen characters, the reader discovers that the Expulsion is a story, not only about destruction, but ultimately about creation. In Satan's version of the fall of the rebellious angels, the expulsion appears to have cost God a lot of money. effort. Satan remembers a huge army of angels pursuing him, which he compares to “sulphurous hail” (i: 171). This demeaning and mocking image increases the storm imagery omnipresent in the story since “sulphurous hail” can mean “stormy hail”. The image of sulfur also refers to the sulfur of hell and the sulfur left over from a gunpowder discharge. Satan reuses the image of a fired projectile in line 176, when he speculates that God has "spent his arrows." “Trees,” again in accordance with meteorological imagery, means “beams of lightning” (OED), as well as “that which is created, a creature” (OED). Thus, God uses his created angels; he consumes them. The presumption that he "spent his arrows" is a bold challenge to the idea of ​​God's omnipotence. Satan implies that God, being limited in power, lessened his assault only because he himself was "exhausted" or had exhausted his supply of angels. Satan indicates that God's passionate effort is fueled by fiery, irrational anger. His description of God's "impetuous rage" and "howling" characterizes God as a reckless, violent, and immature child. To describe the defeat, Satan said that God had “outdone” the rebellious angels. In addition to further enhancing the storm imagery, the word "exaggerated" also suggests that God blew too much, that God lost control of his sudden and fickle nature and used excessive force. Additionally, “o'erblown” is a corruption of “knocked down,” the word used by later narrators to recount the expulsion. Satan's perverse rhetoric hinders our search for truth. Until now, we accept Satan's story as it is and ultimately fall with him. The poem still has not revealed that the being truly responsible for Satan's scandalous defeat is the Son of God, a figure Satan excludes. Thus, we have not yet noticed Satan's forced forgetting, his tendency to omit and repress traumatic memories. In the next version of the expulsion, Chaos recounts the indignity and pitiful magnitude of Satan's defeat. In line 994, Chaos tells Satan that he and his followers "did not flee in silence", thus downplaying the troubled state of the rebel angels to a comic degree. In the next two lines, Chaos describes the flight as "ruin upon ruin, rout upon rout / Confusion worse still." While doingnoticing that the rebellious angels were "confused", Chaos rhetorically completes his description of their fate by the repetition of "ruin" and "rout", and by the repetition of the meaning of "confusion" with its synonym "confused". In lines 998-999, Chaos says that the sky "Pours out its victorious bands by the millions / Pursuing." By the use of enjambment, "the victorious bands", the subject of the preceding clause, become the pursuers, the subject of the second clause. One clause follows another, producing the effect of an implacable and endless defeat. While Chaos paints a dramatic and complex description of Satan's fall, he himself appears as an upset but calm spectator. Later, when Raphael says that Chaos, like Satan, was confounded and ruined by expulsion, we realize that Chaos was displacing his humiliation by focusing on Satan's shameful defeat. The narrator, presumably Milton, is the first reliable speaker to tell the story of the expulsion. It contradicts Satan's claim, which was corroborated by Chaos, that multitudes of faithful angels aided in the pursuit of Satan and his followers. The narrator indicates that the Son expelled the rebellious angels by himself, without any additional help. Addressing the Son, he says that "Return from the pursuit of thy powers with great acclamations / Thou only exalted" (III: 397-398), as if the angels were waiting idly in heaven to congratulate the Son on his solitary victory . Thus we discover that Satan's memory of his many pursuers is false. Because defeat at the hands of countless legions is far more acceptable than defeat at the hands of a single individual, Satan's psychological defense mechanisms have constructed a fantasy to alleviate the crushing indignity of his fall. Given the narrator's tone during his telling, we must re-evaluate Satan's portrayal of God. Compared to the raging and blistering tale of Satan's God, the narrator's Son of God defeats Satan and his followers with ease and composure. The Son exercises a manifestly passive force; he “spared not” (iii: 393) his powers, “nor stopped [his] flaming chariot wheels” (iii: 394). The narrator focuses on what the Son did not do: he simply did not restrain his overflowing power. The God who seems madly angry with Satan is wonderfully imperturbable in the eyes of the narrator. As readers, we begin our transition from the limited perspectives of Satan and Chaos to a divine point of view. The Son wields power effortlessly because he can destroy as easily as he creates: “all the powers therein / By thee created, and by thee cast forth.” down” (iii: 390-391). In another part of the poem, Satan claims that he was "self-begotten" (v: 857), thus usurping the Son's role as creator. In yet another part, Satan claims that his forces "shake [God's] throne" (i: 105), contradicting the narrator's account that the Son "shake the eternal structure of Heaven" (i: 105). iii: 394-395). Once again, Satan takes the role of the Son by assuming that he was the power that caused the shaking of the throne. Satan's misattribution of the Son's power to himself is another defense mechanism. His unconscious reconfigures his memory to maintain the desperate belief that his actions and existence, rather than being a submissive part of God's will, actually have a self-determined consequence to God's plans. Satan refuses to remember the experience of paralyzed helplessness in the face of the absolute omnipotence of the Son. Thus, the narrator's speech is a return of the repressed. This begins to reveal the veil of dignity that Satan has constructed for himself in his story of expulsion. The narrator callsthe rebellious angels “distraught fighting angels,” indicating not only that the rebellious angels were thrown into confusion, but that they were “stripped of their panoply” of assurance. The narrator helps the reader eliminate the false picture and see things as they really are. Raphael, the fourth speaker to tell the story of the expulsion, completes the revision of Satan's original account. Like the narrator, Raphael affirms that the Son led the chase alone. In describing the war in heaven, Raphael said that Moloch was “howling” (vi: 362), while Satan had suggested that God was “howling” (i: 177) in rage. Once again we learn that Satan has misattributed an action as a shameful loss of self-control. Through a reversal of attribution, Raphael reverses the previous narrative as part of his implicit mission to correct the errors of Satan and Chaos. Raphael's most powerful revision concerns the actual fall of the rebellious angels from heaven. In Satan's account, it seems that God's storm of angels drove Satan and his followers "from the precipice/of heaven" (i: 173-174). While "precipice" obviously means "sheer cliff", its more interesting definition is "fall or precipitous descent to great depth" (OED). And in fact, Raphael confirms and elucidates Satan's unconscious slip of the tongue: "they themselves rushed / From the edge of heaven... to the abyss" (vi: 864-866). The astonishing revelation of these lines centers on the alliterative phrase "themselves they cast themselves." Once again, Satan is guilty of misattribution, this time denying his personal responsibility for what is ultimately a self-inflicted fall by claiming that God's angels overthrew him. Paradoxically, Satan was all too right in his earlier proclamation that "the spirit... in itself / Can make heaven out of hell, hell out of heaven" (i:254-255), that heaven and hell can be reduced to psychological states. Yet Satan cannot admit that hell was already within him, that his already crushed spirit was precisely what caused him to throw himself from the precipice. Indeed, although Satan's account of expulsion in Book I displays a face of confident defiance, sublimated traces of shame reside in his speech. Furthermore, Raphael's powerful account radically revises the earlier version of the expulsion of Chaos. Lines 867-868 of Raphael's story, "Hell heard...hell saw / Heaven is ruined from the sky", recall the case in which Chaos thought he had "seen and heard" (ii: 993) Satan's angels pursued by bands of faithful angels. Raphael's expression, "The sky is ruined from the sky", means "the rebellious angels falling from the sky". In his narrative, Chaos fails to distinguish between "heaven" referring to the band of rebellious angels and "sky" referring to the band of loyal angels. Thus, he misinterprets the chaotic tumult of the fall of the rebel angels by assuming the presence of two parties, the pursued rebels and the pursuing angels. In fact, Raphael's story shows that the pursued and the pursuer are one and the same. This rereading reinforces the idea that the hell of Satan's angels is within them, that they have thrown themselves over the precipice, fleeing from each other in confusion, compounding ruin upon ruin. Lines 871-874 of Raphael's story answer the question of why Chaos created such chaos. an inaccurate observation concerning Satan's pursuers: Nine days they fell; the confused Chaos roared and felt a tenfold confusion in their fall. Through its savage anarchy, such an enormous rout burdened it with ruin... The sensations of Chaos and the memories of the event were exaggerated; the angels fell nine days but Chaos felt aconfusion increased tenfold. His exaggerated narrative does not recount events as they actually happened, but rather reveals events as a disoriented Chaos felt they were happening. Raphael repeats three important words from the story of Chaos: “confused”, “rout” and “ruin”. While Chaos applied these negative adjectives to Satan and his angels, Raphael applies these adjectives to Chaos. Chaos is not the sedate spectator it pretends to be. Instead, he simply shifted his own humiliating feelings onto the wayward angels. By focusing on Satan's utter devastation, Chaos hoped to forget its own. Thus, the “howling through the vast and boundless depths” that Satan heard and attributed to God (i: 177) could actually be the “roar[s]” of Chaos (vi: 871), thus conveying its character psychologically heartbreaking. experience.For Satan and Chaos, the expulsion was eventful. For God, the expulsion was effortless and orderly. Raphael describes the rebellious angels “like a flock / Of fearful goats or herds gathered together” (vi: 857-858). In this image, the tamed and debased rebel angels operate as an indistinguishable mass. Through the alliterative phrase “in crowds,” we see the rebel angels crowded together, a contained microcosm of chaos and disorder organized within a larger divine plan of natural harmony. Raphael gives us a broader and more complete picture in which to place the fall of the rebellious angels. Unlike the stormy images of Satan's story, Raphael offers us a calm pastoral in which the Son, with ease, leads and controls a confused but easy to manage flock. From Satan's point of view, however, the expulsion was characterized by pure chaos; God simply lost control and threw the universe into disorderly tumult. Indeed, Satan's inability to confront divinity's power and his ability to contain evil indicate his limited perspective. By placing the expulsion in the sense of a larger divine design, Raphael presents a Miltonic counterplot. This counterplot, present throughout the different accounts of the expulsion, is in agreement with the plan of divine creation. Chaos says “another world / Hung above my kingdom, bound by a golden chain / On this side of the sky from which your legions have fallen” (ii: 1006-1006). God leaves a new creation following the destruction of the rebellious angels. The new "chain" silently speaks of order and connection, forming the counterplot embedded in the story of Chaos. In the narrator's account, the Son rides in his chariot to destroy Satan and his followers. The Son later uses this same chariot to create man. The narrator's statement about the rebellious angels: "It is by you that you created and by you that overthrew" (iii: 390-391) also indicates a synergy between creation and destruction. This binary opposition between creation and destruction, like the binary opposition between good and evil, is a main theme of Paradise Lost. Each word derives its meaning by relationship or opposition with its complement, and this contrast creates meaning. For this reason, differentiation, distinction, discrimination and digestion are important to Paradise Lost because they are an integral part of the act of creation. Each of these words begins with the prefix “di,” which means “two.” Creation consists of refining an undifferentiated substance into two opposing binaries. Thus, we must view Satan's destruction as a necessary complement to God's plan of creation. We begin to discern the root causes of anxiety and repression in Satan's speech. He is too hopelessly self-centered to see beyond the surrounding destruction, and he psychologically cannot afford..