Satan's Tale Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay I169: But see, the angry victor has remembered170: His ministers of vengeance and persecution171: Return to the gates of heaven: the sulphurous hail172: Struck behind us in the storm, the fiery wave has poured in173: the fiery wave, which from the precipice174: of the sky welcomed us falling and the thunder,175: winged with red lightning and impetuous anger,176: perhaps it has exhausted its arrows, and ceases now177: Screaming across the immense and boundless abyss. Tale of ChaosII992: He hurled himself against the king of heaven, though overthrown.993: I have seen and heard, for an army so numerous994: He did not flee silently across the frightened abyss995: With ruin upon ruin, rout upon rout,996: Confusion worse confused; and the gates of heaven997: Pour out his victorious bands in millions998: Pursuing. I on my borders here999: maintain residence; if all I can serve,1000: What little remains to defend1001: Invaded still through our intestines boils1002: Weakening the scepter of ancient Night: the first hell1003: Thy prison that stretches far and wide below;1004 : Now ultimately heaven and earth, another world1005: Suspended over my kingdom, bound in a golden chain1006: On that side the sky from where your legions fell: Storyteller's taleIII390: He the heaven of heavens and all powers contained in it391: Created by you and destroyed by you392: The aspiring dominations: you that day393: Your fathers did not spare the tremendous thunder,394: Nor did they stop the flaming wheels of your chariots, which trembled395: The eternal structure of the sky, while above the hills396: Thou didst stand of warring angels in disorder.397 : Withdraw from the pursuit of thy powers with loud acclamations398: Thee alone exalted, Son of thy fathers might,399: To execute fierce vengeance upon his enemies, tale of Raphael VI856: He raised the overthrown, and like a flock857: Of goats or fearful flocks crowded together858: He pushed them before him astonished, chased859: With terrors and with furies to the limits860: And the crystal wall of the sky, which opened wide, 861: It rolled inward, and a wide gap opened862: Into the wasteful depths; the monstrous vision863: It struck them backwards in horror, but much worse864: It pushed them backwards; they threw themselves headlong865: Down from the edge of heaven, eternal wrath866: They burned behind them in the bottomless abyss.867: Hell heard the unbearable noise, hell saw868: Heaven fell from heaven and would have fled869: Scared ; but stern fate had cast too deep870: Its dark foundations, and too quickly had bound.871: They fell for nine days; roared the confused chaos,872: and felt ten times more confusion in their fall873: for its wild anarchy, a defeat so great874: burdened him with ruin: hell at last875: yawning received them whole, and closed upon them, 876: Hell their fit habitation pregnant with fire877: Unquenchable, the home of misery and pain.878: The discharged sky rejoiced, and soon repaired879: Its mural breach, returning from whence it rolled.880: Sole victor by the expulsion of his enemiesThere are four versions of the expulsion of the rebellious angels in Paradise Lost. Satan and Chaos, both fallen sources, tell the first two versions while the narrator and Raphael, both transcendent sources, tell the last two versions. Reviewing the first two versions in light of the last two, we discover revealing discrepancies between the narratives of opposing pairs of narrators. These discrepancies force us to address the problem of memory. Satan and Chaos repress, move and omit memoriesof traumatic expulsion because they cannot face the guilt and shame resulting from their defeat. Through these psychological defense mechanisms, they refuse to recognize their metaphysical role in the universe as tragic characters destined to fall. While the reader initially shares the fallen characters' misperceptions, the narrator and Raphael correct the errors of Satan and Chaos and guide 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 defines as "a second plot, expressed simultaneously with the first". This counterplot is a "hidden presence" that overlooks the story, placing Satan's destruction within the larger divine plan of creation. By rejecting the distorted perspectives of the fallen characters, the reader discovers that the expulsion is a story, not simply about destruction, but ultimately about creation. In Satan's version of the fall of the rebel angels, the expulsion appears to have cost God a great deal of effort. Satan recalls a huge host of pursuing angels, which he compares to "sulphurous hail" (i:171). This belittling and derisive image augments the tale's pervasive images of stormy weather as "sulphurous hail" can mean "thundering 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 bullet fired in verse 176, when he hypothesizes that God has "exhausted his arrows." “Trees,” again in accordance with storm imagery, means “streaks of lightning” (OED), as well as “that which is created, a creature” (OED). Therefore, God consumes his created angels; consumes them. The presumption that he has "spent his arrows" is a bold challenge to the idea of ​​God's omnipotence. Satan implies that God, being limited in power, quelled his onslaught only because he himself was "exhausted" or because he had exhausted his escort of angels. Satan indicates that God's passionate effort is fueled by fiery, irrational anger. His description of God's "fiery anger" and "mooing" characterizes God as a reckless, violent, and immature child. To describe the defeat, Satan says that God had "overcome" the rebellious angels. In addition to further reinforcing the image of stormy weather, the word "overwhelmed" also suggests that God blew too much, lost control of his sudden and fickle temper, and used excessive force. Furthermore, "o'erblown" is a distortion of "overthrown", the word used by later narrators to recount the expulsion. Satan's perverse rhetoric impedes our search for truth. So far we accept Satan's story as it is and end up falling with him. The poem has not yet revealed that the person truly responsible for Satan's shameful defeat is the Son of God, a character whom Satan excludes. Therefore, we must still note Satan's forced oblivion, his tendency to omit and repress traumatic memories. In the later version of the expulsion, Chaos recounts the humiliation and pitiful extent of Satan's defeat. In verse 994, Chaos tells Satan that he and his followers "did not flee in silence", thus comically downplaying the agitated condition of the rebel angels. In the next two lines, Chaos describes the escape as "ruin upon ruin, broken upon broken / Confusion worse yet confused." While emphasizing that the rebel angels were "confused", Chaos rhetorically enriches his description of their situation with the repetition of "ruin" and "defeat" and with the repetition in the meaning of "confusion" with its synonym "confused". In verses 998-999, Chaos saysthat the sky "Poured out its victorious bands in millions / Pursuing." With the use of enjambement, the "victorious gangs", the subject of the previous clause, become the pursuers, the subject of the second clause. One clause chases another, producing the effect of a relentless and endless defeat. While Chaos paints a dramatic and nuanced description of Satan's fall, he himself, meanwhile, presents himself as an annoyed but composed spectator. Later, when Raphael says that Chaos, like Satan, was confused and ruined by the expulsion, we realize that Chaos was trying to replace his humiliation by fixating on Satan's shameful defeat. The narrator, presumably Milton, is the first reliable speaker to tell the story of the expulsion. He contradicts Satan's claim, which has been confirmed by Chaos, that multitudes of loyal angels aided in the hunt for Satan and his followers. The narrator indicates that the Son chased away the rebellious angels alone, without any further help. Addressing the Son, he says that "Return from seeking your powers with great acclamations / They have only exalted you" (iii:397-398), as if the angels were idly waiting in heaven to congratulate the Son on his solitary victory. We thus discover that Satan's memory of numerous persecutors is false. Because defeat at the hands of countless legions is far more palatable than defeat at the hands of a single individual, Satan's psychological defense mechanisms have constructed a fantasy to mitigate the crushing humiliation of his downfall. In consideration of the narrator's tone throughout his telling, we must reevaluate Satan's portrayal of his fall. God. Compared to Satan's tale of the furious and torrid God, the narrator's Son of God defeats Satan and his followers with ease and poise. The Son exerts a decidedly 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 hold back his overflowing strength. The God who seems deliriously angry at Satan is beautifully unflappable to 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 so easily because he can destroy as easily as he creates: “all the powers therein contained / By thee created, and cast down by thee” (iii:390-391). Elsewhere in the poem, Satan claims to have "begotten himself" (v:857), thus usurping the Son's role as creator. In yet another place, Satan states that his forces "shaken [God's] throne" (i:105), contradicting the narrator's account, which says that the Son "shaken/the eternal structure of Heaven" (iii:394-395). Once again, Satan takes over 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 support the desperate belief that his actions and existence, rather than being an attenuated part of God's will, actually have a self-determined consequence on God's plans. Satan refuses to remember the experience of paralyzed impotence in the face of the absolute omnipotence of the Son. The narrator's speech is therefore a return of the repressed. The veil of dignity that Satan has constructed for himself in the story of the expulsion begins to be revealed. The narrator calls the rebel angels "disorderly warrior angels", which indicates not only that the rebel angels were thrown into confusion, but that they were "stripped of their equipment" of confidentself-confidence. The narrator helps the reader to eliminate false appearances 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 tale. Like the narrator, Raphael says that the Son completed the chase alone. Describing the war in heaven, Raphael says that Moloch was "mooing" (vi:362), while Satan had suggested that God was "mooing" (i:177) in anger. Once again we learn that Satan has misattributed an action, this time characterizing a shameful loss of self-control. Through a reversal of attribution, Raphael reverses the previous tale 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 rebel angels from heaven. In Satan's account, God's storm of angels appears to have swept Satan and his followers "off the precipice / Of heaven" (i:173-174). While “precipice” obviously means “steep cliff,” its more interesting definition is “headlong fall or descent to great depth” (OED). And indeed Raphael confirms and clarifies Satan's unconscious slip: "they threw themselves headlong / from the edge of heaven... into the abyss" (vi:864-866). The astonishing revelation of these verses centers on the alliterative phrase "they themselves cast." Once again, Satan is guilty of misattribution, this time denying personal responsibility for what is ultimately a self-inflicted fall, claiming that God's angels threw him down. Paradoxically, Satan was all too right in his earlier proclamation that "the mind... in itself / can make hell a heaven, a hell of heaven" (i:254-255), that heaven and hell can be reduced to psychological states. However, Satan cannot admit that hell was already within him, that his already crushed spirit is precisely what led him to throw himself off the cliff. Indeed, although the account of Satan's expulsion in Book I shows an expression of confident defiance, sublimated traces of shame reside in his speech. Furthermore, Raphael's powerful account radically revises the previous version of the expulsion of Chaos. Lines 867-868 of Raphael's story, "Hell heard... hell saw / Heaven in ruins from heaven", recall the case in which Chaos thought he "saw and heard" (ii:993) Satan's angels chased by bands of faithful angels. Raphael's expression, "Heaven falls from heaven", means "the rebellious angels falling from heaven". In his tale, Chaos fails to distinguish between the "heaven" referring to the band of rebellious angels and the "heaven" referring to the band of faithful angels. Therefore, he misinterprets the chaotic turmoil of the fall of the rebel angels by presupposing the presence of two parties, the persecuted rebels and the pursuing angels. Indeed, Raphael's tale shows that the pursued and the pursuer are the same thing. This rereading reinforces the idea that the hell of Satan's angels is within them, who threw themselves into the precipice, fleeing from each other in confusion, causing ruin upon ruin. Lines 871-874 of Raphael's tale answer the question of why Chaos created such an inaccurate observation regarding Satan's pursuers: They fell for nine days; the confused Chaos roared and felt the confusion tenfold in their fall. Through his wild anarchy, such a great defeat burdened him with ruin... The sensations and memories of the Chaos of the event were exaggerated; the angels fell for nine days but Chaos felt ten times more confused. His exaggerated account does not tell the events as they actually happened, but rather reveals the events as they areas a disoriented Chaos perceived them as having happened. Raphael repeats three important words from the tale of Chaos: “confused,” “broken,” and “ruin.” While Chaos applied these negative adjectives to Satan and his angels, Raphael applies these adjectives to Chaos. Chaos is not the composed spectator it has imagined itself to be. Instead, he simply transferred his humiliating feelings onto the rebellious angels. By fixating on Satan's utter devastation, Chaos hoped to forget his own. Thus, the "roaring across the vast and boundless depths" that Satan heard and attributed to God (i:177) may actually have been the "roar[s]" of Chaos (vi:871), thus conveying its harrowing level psychological. experience. For Satan and Chaos, the expulsion was turbulent. By God, the expulsion was simple and orderly. Raphael describes the rebellious angels "as a flock / Of goats or a fearful flock herded together" (vi:857-858). In this image, the tamed and diminished rebel angels operate as an indistinguishable mass. With the alliterative phrase “crowded together” we see the rebellious angels packed close together, a contained microcosm of chaos and disorder organized within a larger divine arrangement of natural harmony. Raphael offers us a broader and more complete framework in which to place the fall of the rebel angels. In contrast to the stormy images of Satan's tale, Raphael offers us a calm pastoral in which the Son, with ease, directs and controls a confused but easily manageable flock. From Satan's perspective, however, the expulsion was characterized by pure chaos; God simply lost control and threw the universe into disorderly turmoil. Indeed, Satan's inability to confront divine power and his ability to contain evil indicate his limited perspective. By placing the expulsion in the sense of a larger divine plan, Raphael presents a Miltonian counterplot. This counterplot, present in the various stories of the expulsion, is consonant with the plan of divine creation. Chaos says "another world / Suspended over my kingdom, bound in a golden chain / On that side heaven from where your legions fell" (II: 1006-1006). God leaves a new creation in the wake of the destruction of the rebel angels. The new “chain” silently speaks of order and connection, forming the counterplot embedded in the story of Chaos. In the narrator's tale, the Son rides his chariot to destroy Satan and his followers. The Son will later use this same chariot to create man. The narrator's statement about the rebellious angels, "By thee created and by thee destroyed" (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 major theme throughout Paradise Lost. Each word derives its meaning from the relationship or opposition to its complement, and this contrast creates meaning. For this reason, differentiation, distinction, discrimination, and digestion are important to Paradise Lost because they are a necessary part of the act of creation. Each of these words begins with the prefix "di", which means "two". Creation is about refining an undifferentiated substance into two opposing binaries. Therefore, we must view Satan's destruction as a necessary complement to God's creative plan. We begin to discern the underlying causes of anxiety and repression in Satan's speech. He is too desperately self-centered to see beyond the surrounding destruction, and cannot psychologically allow himself to accept his ignominious fate within God's grand plan. Just as he corrects Adam's interpretations of human history, Raphael corrects the conception.