Sublimely Gifted but Destined to Fall: A Comparative Study of Conrad’s Kurtz and Milton’s Satan as the Archetype of Evil Genius

Abstract

The publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost has effectively reopened the partly forsaken ‘box’ with archetypes so as to trigger novel philosophical, religious and literary reflection upon their indispensable value in constructing the narrative framework. Its major value has also been generally perceived as taking apart the deck of traditionally placed emphases on those narrative phenomena and, after their extensive reordering, as stimulating an increase of crops in a field that has already proved so fertile in the past but has, unfortunately, become slightly abandoned. It facilitates the comprehension of archetypes as “the basic and supposedly universal preoccupations of humanity which are thought to inhere in the very structure of the soul, and of which the varieties of cultures with their different mythologies, imageries and concepts, are typical expressions” (Werblowsky, xiii); the literary figures acting not only as intermittent symbols, motifs or myths in literature, mythology or culture, but also as bare structures, unfilled patterns or theoretical possibilities, without any content, indicating the chance of loading the given outline with an imaginable, substantial and nameable content of some specified action, thought or perception.