Faust, Part One — themes & analysis

Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, in 1592, sells his soul for a fixed term — twenty-four years of magic, knowledge, and worldly power, dragged off to hell at midnight when the term expires. The theology is straightforward. Goethe, two centuries later, writes a different bargain. His Faust does not promise his soul for a finite pleasure; he proposes a test of his own character. If Mephistopheles can ever give him a single moment so satisfying that he says to it linger awhile, you are so fair — the moment is the devil's. Until then, no charge.

The formulation is the structural risk on which the entire play, and indeed Part Two, is built. Faust is wagering not against a fixed term of indulgence but against his own capacity ever to be satisfied. The bet collapses the older theological economy of temptation — the soul at stake not for what Faust accepts but for whether he can be made to rest in any of it. He cannot. He sleeps with Gretchen and is restless. He attends the witches' sabbath on the Brocken and is restless. In Part Two he conjures Helen of Troy and drains a coastal marsh for a model society and is restless to the last. The devil cannot win because the hero cannot stop.

Modern debates about ambition, technology, and cost almost always reach unconsciously for the word Faustian without realizing how exact Goethe's version of it is. A scientist trades ethics for a breakthrough. A company trades integrity for a quarter's growth. Each is performing some local version of Faust's wager — and on Goethe's reading, none of them can say in the moment what they are wagering, because the wager is not a deal with a devil but a posture toward one's own life, only legible afterwards in the wreckage it has produced. The wager is announced formally in Study Part 2. It controls everything that follows.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (the Lord accepts the bet), Scene 7 (pact signed in blood), Scene 24 (Walpurgis Night — restlessness embodied), Scene 28 (the dungeon — the cost of the bet).

Faust says it himself early in the play, in one of the most quoted lines in German literature: two souls, alas, reside within my breast. One pulls toward the world and the senses, toward action, embodiment, the immediate satisfactions of appetite. The other pulls toward spirit and abstraction, toward the Earth Spirit Faust attempts to summon in the opening scene and is repulsed by. The tension never resolves. It is the engine of the play. Almost every scene can be read as one of the two souls speaking and the other in retreat.

The opening soliloquy in Night is the contemplative soul at its most exhausted — Faust has spent his life in the study and found it empty, and the appetite for the world surges against the long abstraction. Auerbach's tavern is the appetite-soul at its most disappointed — the drunkards' songs and conjured wine are not what Faust wanted experience to be. Walpurgis Night on the Brocken is the appetite-soul let off the leash, and Faust still finds himself bored. Gretchen's bedroom is the only scene in which the two souls briefly meet — Faust loves her and lusts after her in the same breath, and the love is real even though what he is doing to her is destruction.

Goethe's invention here is not the doubling itself, which has religious and philosophical precedents, but the refusal to resolve it. Earlier moralists had treated the divided self as a problem to be cured. Goethe treats it as the structure of being human at the level of complexity Faust represents. The play does not ask its hero to integrate the two souls; it asks him to live with both of them, and the cost of the living is what gets onto the page. Every later treatment of the divided modern self in European literature — Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Conrad's Marlow, every contemporary novel of consciousness — works in the territory Goethe opened with this sentence.

Where to follow it: Scene 4 (Night — the first soliloquy), Scene 5 (Before the Gate — two souls speech), Scene 15 (Garden — two souls in one scene), Scene 24 (Walpurgis Night — appetite without satisfaction).

Goethe invented Gretchen. The older Faust chapbooks have nothing like her — they are about the scholar and his demons, with women appearing as conjured succubi or aristocratic seductions. Goethe added an ordinary townswoman of fifteen or sixteen to the legend and let her bear the cost of the bargain Faust has signed. She lives with her mother in a small German town in a tidy room with a chest of drawers and a prayer book. Faust sees her on the street as she is leaving the cathedral and wants her. She refuses his clumsy proposition and goes home.

Mephistopheles engineers the seduction with a casket of jewels left in her cupboard, a bribed neighbor Marthe to stand as social cover, and a sleeping draught that Gretchen is told to give her mother on the night of the assignation. The mother does not wake. Gretchen's brother Valentin returns from war, learns of his sister's ruin, and is killed in a street fight by Faust under Mephistopheles's hand. Gretchen, abandoned and pregnant, drowns the infant she bears. She is arrested and sentenced to death, goes mad in the cell, and refuses to flee when Faust comes to the dungeon to rescue her. A voice from above announces that she is saved.

The moral weight of Part One settles on her, not on Faust. The play's most original move is the one almost no commentator on the legend before Goethe had thought to make: to put the cost of the metaphysical hero's striving on a person who never asked for any of it, and to let that person — rather than the hero — carry the play's tragic dimension. Without Gretchen, Faust is a scholar with a bargain. With her, he is a man whose striving is shown to have a price, and to be paid by someone else. Valentin's dying speech, where he denounces his sister publicly before dying rather than cursing her seducer, is Goethe at his most morally exact: the brother is right that her life is ruined, wrong about who bears the blame.

Where to follow it: Scene 10 (Street — the first sight), Scene 11 (Evening — the jewels, the seduction begins), Scene 18 (Gretchen's Room — the spinning-wheel soliloquy), Scene 28 (Dungeon — the catastrophe).

The devil in Goethe's Faust is one of the most unusual figures in European literature — not because he is evil, but because he is so often right. He calls himself part of that power which would do evil ever, yet ever does good. He is sardonic, cultured, brilliantly funny, and almost always the smartest voice in the room. He does not lie outright; he reframes, ironizes, offers a sceptical reading of every elevated sentiment, and lets human appetite do the rest. In Auerbach's tavern he plays a casual prank that exposes the drunkards as fools. In the witch's kitchen he despises the hocus-pocus while admitting magic is what is required to make Faust young again.

He gives Faust the line about two souls in his breast back to him in a wittier form. He tells the truth about Wagner's scholarship more accurately than Wagner does. He flirts with Marthe in the garden with transparent clumsiness, knowing the clumsiness helps the seduction along by being so evidently the wrong man for the widow he is amusing. The play gives him its sharpest lines and its clearest view of human self-deception, and the reader keeps catching herself agreeing with him. The agreement is part of what the play is doing.

The Romantic generation that came up reading Faust often took Mephistopheles as the hero, the modern voice cutting through Faust's fustian. The conservative tradition that read it later took him as the seductive sceptic against whom the reader must steel herself. Both readings underestimate what Goethe is doing. Mephistopheles is funny because he is partly right and dangerous because being partly right is enough. He is the figure in whom Goethe acknowledges that intelligent disenchantment is one of the strongest moves available to a modern mind, and the play's quiet challenge is to its reader: to admit how often this voice is your own.

Where to follow it: Scene 7 (Study II — the pact scene, Mephisto's terms), Scene 8 (Auerbach's Cellar — the prank), Scene 13 (The Neighbor's House — with Marthe), Scene 26 (Gloomy Day — Mephisto's indictment of Faust).

The Lord says it in the Prologue in Heaven, before a single scene of the play has played: a good man, in his dark bewildered course, will not forget the way of righteousness. The line gives away the ending of Part Two — Faust is saved at the close of the second play, his soul carried up by angels singing about whoever strives endlessly we can redeem — and inverts the entire moral logic the older Faust legend had operated on. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was warning literature: the scholar reached too far and was dragged off to hell at midnight. Goethe rewrites the verdict.

He lets his Faust keep striving and lets the wreckage stand. Gretchen is destroyed in Part One. Faust survives and continues into Part Two. The play does not condemn the hunger and does not absolve it either. It refuses to choose. The refusal is the single most consequential move Goethe makes for the next two centuries of European literature. Faust becomes the prototype for the modern protagonist whose energy and damage cannot be separated — Captain Ahab in Melville, Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky, the founder figure of contemporary Silicon Valley mythology, every character in serious modern fiction whose drive is the source of both achievement and harm.

The Faustian hero is what European literature looked like once it had decided that the energetic ambition that ruined Marlowe's scholar was also the energy by which any of its modern protagonists got anything done at all. Goethe does not endorse that decision. He records it. The price of recording it is Gretchen. Every reader who finishes the dungeon scene and feels both the grandeur of Faust's striving and the full weight of what it has cost her has understood what Goethe was writing about. The play does not ask them to resolve the tension. It asks them to hold both at once.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (Prologue in Heaven — the Lord's guarantee), Scene 4 (Night — striving as despair), Scene 26 (Gloomy Day — the cost of striving lands), Scene 28 (Dungeon — the guarantee's price).