Rose-Colored Narration

The narrator in Oroonoko appears to see the Prince through some sort of rose-colored glasses. He or she starts by saying that everything about Oroonoko has not been embellished in any way and that "it shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues, there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention" (2183).

Yeah, okay. Thing is, if everyone in this story has flaws, why is Oroonoko so highly praised? According to the narrator, the man has "real greatness of soul", "refined notions of true honor", "absolute genorosity", and "softness that was capable of the highest passions of love and gallantry" (2186). I understand trying to sell something, or in this case, someone, but holy cow. This narrator practically worships the guy. Maybe I'm being super cynical, but this seems a little suspicious.

Regardless of the narrator's praise of Oroonoko, I do feel a little sorry for him. I'd be pretty ticked if my grandparent decided that they liked the person I loved and stole them away from me, even though they have plenty of other lovers already. It's just greedy, not matter how beautiful and kind and modest Imoinda is.

I still feel a little unclear on this, but it sounds an awful lot like the King sends Imoinda a veil which basically stakes his claim on her. She can't refuse, and Oroonoko can't do anything about it either. So the King wins. Great...except for the fact that the King does this simply because this girl sends his heart a-flutter, and "the obedience the people pay their king was not at all inferior to what they paid their gods; and what love would not oblige Imoinda to do, duty would compel her to" (2189). So his thought process is he's gotta have her, even if she doesn't love him. I'll stop there. Creepy old dudes who try to force themselves on younger women make me twitch.

My last thing that I find really interesting is the fact that if you're not looking closely enough, the first part of this reading is a pretty sweet Romeo and Juliet-ish love story. But we don't just see our "Romeo and Juliet". We get to see a lot of different people. No matter what happens by the end, I know one thing. I'm intrigued by this story a lot. As an added bonus, it's beautifully written. And I see sentence structure I recognize again. That's a good place to start.

Satan and the Devils

As I've said once or twice, before starting Paradise Lost, I really did not know what to expect. I knew it had to do something with Satan but I did not know we'd meet lots of devils in the process. I want to take a second to talk about the devils' discussion. I see it kind of like a huddle in football to discuss the next play. Of course there is always one player who ALWAYS gets the glory *cough cough quarterback* and in this case that person is Satan.... the king of Hell and all the Devils.

If I had to choose a king of hell, it'd probably be Satan regardless though. This is because he's so manipulative that he can manipulate the other devils! I mean that's pretty impressive. Like others have mentioned, with their new plan, the human race doesn't really stand a chance against a guy like Satan. He almost beat God for crying out loud!

Sin, Death, Satan, Oh my!

So, the second part of Book II was well, interesting… Particularly how Sin is Satan’s daughter, but also the mother of his son. And then their son, Death, rapes his mother and she conceives the dog-like beasts that reside in her womb. Before reading the footnote, Sin’s conception immediately reminded me of Athena popping out of the head of Zeus. Athena is the goddess of wisdom, and is thus, an extension of her father’s mind. So it seems fitting that Sin was created by the evil thoughts that permeated Satan’s mind before he got kicked out of Heaven. This is one dark, messed up situation if you ask me. But I guess it makes sense considering incest is a sin, and I guess, Death is the ultimate outcome of Sin? But death is a natural human condition, so I am not exactly sure what to make of it.

I’ve been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in my World Lit class and a lot of Inferno is meant to be a perversion of Christian ideals, and Milton is doing the same thing. The father, son/grandson, mother relationship seems to be a demented version of the Holy Trinity. Boy, is humanity doomed. Somehow that feeling resonates…..

Dream

You go to sleep. You have slept most of the night and you are continuing to sleep. In your dream, you are awake. You are not in your room. You don’t know where you are. No one knows where you are. Somehow you find out that you have superpowers at night while you are asleep. Your memory works perfectly. You remember everything. You know everything that you will do the next day when you wake. The dream turns into something different. It takes you further from reality into some distant future where you are everything and have everything. There is something about your thoughts that changes. Your thinking is more thoughtful like. There is a maze in your brain that you must follow to the end where you come to a dramatic realization that you are something more than your reality. You are running down a corridor. It is pitch black. It is so dark you can and cannot see things. I don’t think anyone can see anything in the dead of black. You wake up. You go to sleep again having woken up frightened and fall back into another dream. You are dreaming about your next day, and your past life. You want to never wake up because you can see everything and it is all so very clear. It is better than watching television. It is like watching a film, or rather being awake and actively engaging in life.

            In books, dreaming is a common subject that is often perpetrated by the consumption of alcohol or marijuana. It is often created by the use and creation of one’s own bank of knowledge. It is like eating a worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle. Or watching a worm crawl out of a red apple while doing your first kindergarten homework assignment while wearing glasses. There is something surreal about this image as if you have just been put into your own dream and have suddenly awoken. I find this nearly as troubling as a Trump election like when you awoke the morning after the election and wondered on what island you were marooned for the past few years. There are fighter planes flying over-head. The new President has decided he wants to use all his Presidential rights. There are laws to be put in place to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. He has the right to reinstate the draft then we all get shipped off to Syria for war. It was like waking up to a dream. There is this feeling of a mistake that you don’t know how to wake up from yet everything suddenly becomes reality. The unknown and this change also excites you.

            Lady Macbeth has been witnessed doing things in her sleep. She has her eyes closed and she is pulling papers out of her closet and signing and fiddling with folders like there are legal document binding their kingdom to the murder that has been taking place under the crown. Macbeth has killed in cold blood with the scheming and advise of Macbeths wife Lady Macbeth.  It has been shown that dreams alter reality and mood. They bring people down to earth, and lead to an alteration in how the perceive their reality and their course of action throughout their life due to the change in chemicals in the brain.  It has been shown that women who dream about their ex-husband are more likely to never get back together with their husband due to their differences. Lady Macbeth’s dream is spawned from her husband failure to think of the proper course of action when committing murder, and it is also spawned from murder eating away at Lady Macbeth’s psyche.

“Since her majesty went into the field, I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, right upon’t, read it afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all the while in the most fast asleep (Macbeth1-9)”

Lewis, Penelope A. "What Is Dreaming and What Does It Tell Us about Memory? [Excerpt]." Scientific American. Scientific America, 18 July 2014. Web. 12 Nov. 2016.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/05/google-dreams.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-poster_bed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKYQPZBskIk

I affirm that I “have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this paper”

Alex Cooper

Alexander Stephen Cooper                                                                                              11/14/2016

The Sore Losers of Hell

Alright, so it's clear from the beginning of Paradise Lost that the devils are the losers here. They lost a great battle with God and they all ended up being chained to a fiery lake of doom in Hell. Honestly, they should've just given up on it all and realized that God would always have the upper hand here. But of course, they had to make things difficult, because as my mother would say, "then there wouldn't be a story." Satan's buddies are all like, "wait, this isn't supposed to happen this way. We have to do something about this!" And he realizes that yeah, this situation ain't too cool.

So basically they decide that they need to destroy God's latest and greatest creation: man. Which, I mean, is slightly annoying because it's like bro, we didn't do anything to you. But you know, whatever, this is Milton's world and we're just living in it. So anyway, the devils decide they need a volunteer and Satan's all like "ooh pick me! Pick me! I'll be the hero in this story!" As if anyone would've wanted this to happen differently.

Anyway, so Satan goes to the gates of Hell and finds even more allies in his quest to screw up God's day. I mean, of course, this starts to become super incestuous and uncomfortable for all of us, so I'll just stop at that, but I'll leave you with this: Sin has been through one hell of a life, if you know what I mean.

Hell has quite the collection of characters

Hell is a surprisingly democratic society. I would never have expected a discussion and debate among demons about planning their best collective course of action. That being said, they all should have found their chill before they started this meeting.

Moloch, “the strongest and fiercest spirit” (44), needs to go to some anger management meetings. He wants to go against Heaven with “hell flames and fury” (61) immediately after the devastating loss they just faced. Moloch doesn’t seem to care that it’s a suicide mission; he just wants to go out in a blaze of glory. Moloch SMASH.

Belial, “more graceful and humane” (109) than our angry friend, is a lazy pretty-boy that talks too much and lies a whole lot. He makes me think of all the stereotypes about millennials and that makes me wonder: Does Belial wear leggings or skinny jeans? What about oversized sweaters? Or does he prefer hoodies? Does he show up to meetings fifteen minutes late with starbucks? I need answers.

Mammon is surprisingly practical and optimistic. Planning to “intend at home… what best may ease the present misery and render Hell more tolerable” (456-459), with both Satan and Beëlzebub’s approval, seems laughable and more than a tad ironic to me, but to each their own. Maybe Mammon aspires to star on a renovation reality TV show. He could call it “Flip This House: Hellacious Homes” or something of the sort.

Beëlzebub is Satan’s yes-man and a total brown noser. I’m also not impressed with him pulling a Melania and giving a speech that was startlingly similar to Satan’s speech from Book I in order to encourage the other devils to terrorize “a new race called Man” (358) and make God angry.

I was totally expecting the bit of narration that revealed that Satan wanted to hoard all the glory from volunteering for the mission to escape Hell (and then metaphorically raising it with mankind). I find it really entertaining that everybody else chickened out and that Satan tried to save their pride by saying “with reason hath deep silence and demure seized [them]” (432-433) . Shakespeare lied when he wrote “Hell is empty. And all the devils are here” in The Tempest.The devils are too wimpy to be here.

What to do with this Free Will??

       The devils have all this free will and they don’t really know what to do with it. They are finally able to what they want but they don’t exactly know what that is…yet. 

The way they decide kind of reminds me of when parent have to make a big decision that will affect their kids. Like if the parents got a great job offer but they have to decide if they really want to uproot their family. Or when parliament has to come together to make a decision.

      Ultimately the devils decide that instead of just enjoying what they have and building an empire of their own that they should do what Beelzebub suggested. They should get revenge on God by destroying or corrupting the new race he made, Man. So they should basically try and corrupt or kill god’s pride and joy.

    I guess that makes sense it I the best way to get revenge against God who sent them to Hell. Satan just has to be the one to volunteer to go and scout the new world. It is not like any of the other devils could have volunteered in his place so their leader didn’t have to go. 

However it doesn’t work out like that. Satan decides that he will be the one to explore this new world that God has created. I kind of liked how Satan used the other cosmic beings to get directions to Earth. Who wouldn’t want to have cosmic beings helping you? I think that through this book we can start to see more of the wickedness of Satan and the devils.

For God So Loved the World...

In Book Two, now that they're free to do as they wish in Hell, the devils debate over what course of action to take. Beelzebub comes up with the most-favored plan: destroy God's new world. With traditional stories about the beginning of Christianity in mind, the inclusion of this decision in Paradise Lost makes the story 100% more interesting. We are given a more lucid, logical reason as to why Satan makes his evils present on Earth and targets the human race.

The only problem is, representing Hell in the new world must be exactly what God wants Satan to do. I know I'm assuming that God is truly Almighty, but omniscient powers are part of his job description, so I don't think it's a bad assumption to make. God knows no one would care about getting into Heaven if there wasn't such a shitty alternative. I mean, "Heaven or nothing" sounds a lot less intimidating than "Heaven or Hell." It can't be pure coincidence that God damns Satan and his bros to Hell, unchains them, then creates a new world and allows them inside. He is definitely capable of stopping them whenever He wants, but He doesn't! Besides, who created Hell itself if not God? Maybe there's a backstory to the backstory somewhere out there, but I hope it's written by God himself. I have a few questions for the guy.

If there is a backstory to the backstory out there, I'm trying to find out how the gates to Hell were constructed. There's nine of them for Christ's sake (no pun intended), and they're guarded by who? Satan's asexual child named Sin who he sexually impregnated with Death, and Death raped sin? Did I get that right? What kind of monster rapes his sister/mom? This is so fucked up. Do I even need to mention how ironically irritating it is that Sin is the only female here? Like...alright, I don't know what you're trying to say, God, but it's fine. Just don't act like women aren't the best sin.

Anyways, my favorite part of Book Two is when Satan flies out of Hell and gets directions to Earth from his fellow dark, cosmic entities. I'm just imagining this whole thing playing out in real time. God's a few lightyears away saying, "Let there be light!" - his voice echoing through the universe while the fallen angels strap up for war. Somebody should make a movie out of this, if they haven't already. Honestly, it would be beautiful, and Morgan Freeman could still play God.

Paradise Lost by John Milton.