John Miltons Paradise Lost Essay: Allegory of Sin and Death :: Milton Paradise Lost Essays

Allegory of transgression and Death in nirvana Lost That Miltons heaven Lost is unsurpassed--and hardly equaled--in English literature is broadly accepted by critics and scholars. Whether it may have serious flaws, however, and what they may be, is little certain, for it is here(predicate) that opinion varies. Of dismantleicular interest to some is the fiction of Sin and Death (II. 648-883). Robert C. Fox wonders that it has not been the subject of much more detailed discussion, asking Is it that Miltons readers are puzzled by this episode and, unable to apologise its signifi skunkce, prefer to pass it over in silence? Or do they regard it as so obvious in meaning that no interpretive remarks are necessary? (The Allegory 354). Whatever the answer to Foxs query, his oral sex is well taken in a survey of the bibliography of the Modern lyric Association from 1950-1980, fewer than twenty references specifically devoted to this allegory can be located, and many of these, rat her than pursuing the question of its appropriateness and/or its importance within the total work, simply investigate its tradition and sources. Merritt Y. Hughes, in referring to those scholars who have commented on the allegory, writes that for two centuries critics agreed that the step into pure allegory in Sin and Death was a blemish on the poem and an external incrustation. Recently they have been wondering whether it is not a part of the structural irony of the whole design (177). It is this latter view on which this paper focuses the allegory is indeed an integral part of the whole of Paradise Lost, not an error of judgment on Miltons part, as some critics believe. It is invulnerable on two levels, both in terms of structure and in terms of content. Since it is the presence of allegorical figures-- plumeions--in the epic to which some critics object, it is necessary here to discuss both allegory and epic form. Allegory, according to William Flint thralldom and Addison Hib bard, is defined as an extended metaphor in which objects and persons in a narrative . . . are equated with meanings that lie outside it, uses characters that are usually personifications of abstract qualities, the action and the setting representative of the relationships among these abstractions. Allegory attempts to evoke a twofold interest, one in the events, characters, and setting presented, and the other in the ideas they are mean to convey or the significance they bear (7-8).