Examining the Representation of Satan in Paradise Lost
Examining the Representation of Satan in Paradise Lost
In Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton describes the battle between good and evil, and the portrayal of Satan as a ‘hero’ to try and destroy God’s magnificent plan.
The first impression of Satan that Milton tries to get across to the reader is of Satan’s absolute greatness: this particular quote refers to the hugeness of his spear alone, ‘To equal which the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills’, and he even states that his shield is the size of the moon. Milton uses ‘human’ terms to express the sheer size and power of Satan and his followers, the fallen angels. ‘He above the rest, / In shape and gesture proudly eminent, / Stood like a tower;’ Even though Satan is the leader of the fallen angels and of Hell, he would not be able even to think about fighting God without them, but he is still represented by Milton as a huge figure, even to the most powerful of his followers. The poet builds up Satan’s character by referring to earthly objects (‘the tallest pine’, ‘tower’) as comparisons, and he is able to use more monstrous and horrifying similes to portray this (‘bottomless perdition’, ‘penal fire’).
A very important first epic simile describes the utter magnitude of Satan, and represents Satan as the ‘leviathan’: ‘With fixed anchor in his scaly rind, /….. / So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay,’ which is then mistaken by the fishermen to be a land mass, ‘Deeming some island,’. Some quotes, while they render Satan still to be huge and overpowering, also give an impression of Satan being graceless and cumbersome. ‘As whom the fables name of monstrous size, / Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, / Briareos or Typhon, whom the den / By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim the ocean stream:’
Even though Satan seems to be the ‘fault’ in God’s plan to make a somewhat perfect world, when Milton describes him as the ‘leviathan’, it shows that even Satan, the creator of sin and death, was made by God. To be a real interpreter of Milton’s Paradise Lost, it seems to me, even from the first book, that the reader has to have a basic foreknowledge of the ancient world,...