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Faust: Outside the City Gate: Difference between revisions
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==Commentary== | ==Commentary== | ||
Faust and Wagner interact with the public, which display gratitude for the acts of kindness that Faust and his father did for them. “Indeed it’s only right that you should be with us this happy day, who when our times were bitter, proved himself our friend in every way. Many a one stands in his boots here whom your good father, the last minute, snatched from the hot grip of the fever, that time he quelled the epidemic. And you yourself, a youngster then, never shrank back: every house the pest went in, you did too. Out they carried many a corpse, but never yours. Much you went through: Us you saved, and God saved you” (539). | |||
Wagner explains that Faust should feel gratification for the way the peasants treat him, but Faust feels as if he has done no good and feels as if he has let them down. | |||
Faust begins to wish for things that are inhuman, almost foreshadowing a date with the devil. “If only I had wings to bear me up into the air and follow after!”(541). | |||
Faust states that he has two souls living within him trying to establish that he is a good man with evil tendancies. “Two souls live in me, alas, forever warring with each other. One, amorous of the world, with all its might grapples it close, greedy of all its pleasures; the other fights to rise out of the dust up , up into the heaven of our great forebears”(542). | |||
Faust notices that there is a black dog “coursing back and forth” (542). Faust noticed that the dog is circling around them and he exemplifies more foreshadowing by stating, “Him winding a magic snare, quietly, around our feet, a noose which he’ll pull tight in the future, when the time is ripe” (542). | |||
Faust decides to adopt the dog. | |||
==Study Questions== | ==Study Questions== | ||