Monkey And Faust example essay topic

The most interesting and note worthy set of binary opposites from the reading list in my opinion was in "Faust" and "Monkey". In the text Faust by Goethe there are many example of the struggles between good and evil. At the beginning Faust is introduced as an exemplary servant of God. Mephistopheles and the Lord have a disagreement of his character and the Lord grants him the test Faust. Through out the story Faust begins a downward spiral into the temptations of the devil. The progression through the story leads him deeper into his transformation from almost an angel like state to a demon.

Faust starts off as a well respected doctor who saved many lives during the plague, to a murderer. Along the way there are various angels trying to lead him back to the path that he continues to stray from. In Monkey by Wu Cheng-en the primary binary opposite that was evident to me was that of the student / teacher relationship. The most important was the dominant / submissive. As a student you must submit in order to learn. Monkey greatly wanted to learn how to become immortal, but he constantly struggled with the fact that he had surrender to this higher power in order to achieve his goal.

Monkey had many different teachers along his journey that he was constantly rebelling against. His arrogance and ego keep him attempting to change his role in that relationship. The similarities I found that these two texts share are the strong religious and allegorical importance behind the stories. The story of Faust is a moral lesson in the beliefs of Christianity while Monkey is a story that incorporates beliefs from not only Buddhism, but Taoism and Confucianism as well. Each chapter in Monkey has a moral lesson to be learned that is rooted in the teachings of these three main Chinese religions.

The Characters themselves, Monkey and Faust also share this overwhelming drive to become more than what they are. Faust is a seeker of forbidden knowledge and Monkey is a seeker of forbidden immortality. Both characters are being put to the test. Faust is being tested by God and Mephistopheles whether he will continue to be a model servant when tempted by the devil. At the same time Monkey and his fellow disciples (Pigs and Sandy) are also put to the test of proving themselves worthy. Each of them had created some kind of trouble in heaven and had been kicked out of heaven to live on Earth as punishment.

I saw the duality of the student / teacher relationship in Faust that was plainly evident in Monkey. It seemed as though Mephistopheles acted upon Faust as a teacher figure in the ways of evil. These texts shared a lot of qualities, but there were also some differences. The nature of the story of Monkey is a playful tale written as a satire and full of humor. Although the story takes place in a fantasy setting, the story may have had a historical basis of an early pilgrimage by Hsu an Tsang to India. The work is not of a single person and was also translated to English from its original text in Chinese.

The story of Faust was written in as a romantic drama with a realistic setting by a single author Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, a European writer.