Class: English British Renaissance Literature
Instructions: you’ll write a 1-page single-spaced thesis on Milton PL book 4., The assignment should follow standard organization, with a heading on the top left corner paragraphs topic sentences transitions and quotations from the text. ,you need to make an original argument and reinforce that argument with close readings from the text. ,your assignment needs to have the essentials of a thesis-driven argument, solid organization concise and lucid writing and zero plot summary., Make sure the thesis statement is in the first paragraph in the beginning.
The Double Vision of Satan: Self-Awareness and Self-Deception in Paradise Lost, Book 4
In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, John Milton presents Satan not simply as a figure of evil but as a character caught in the tragic tension between self-awareness and self-deception. This duality—Satan’s acute understanding of his fall and his simultaneous refusal to accept the consequences—creates a portrait of a being whose torment is internal and inescapable. Milton uses Satan’s soliloquy and his interactions with the unfallen world to expose the psychological fragmentation that defines his character. Thus, Milton’s Satan is not powerful because he is resolute in evil, but rather because he is tormented by the irreconcilable conflict between who he was and who he has become.
This conflict is most powerfully articulated in Satan’s soliloquy, where he admits, “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (4.75). The use of the reflexive “myself” underscores Satan’s internalization of damnation. Hell is no longer a place but a condition of being, tied to identity. Milton’s enjambment in the line mirrors Satan’s lack of resolution—his thoughts do not conclude with clarity but spill into self-contradiction. Although Satan acknowledges the justice of his punishment, he immediately recoils from the implications: “but what though I be / Hell,” he muses, “yet not leave / The hope of gaining by success or flight / The Throne of God” (4.86–89). The juxtaposition of “Hell” and “hope” reveals Satan’s persistent delusion—he cannot fully commit to despair, nor can he embrace repentance, which he scorns as servility.
Milton intensifies this internal schism by placing Satan in Eden, a landscape that magnifies his alienation. Looking upon Adam and Eve, Satan is momentarily moved, exclaiming, “Sight hateful, sight tormenting!” (4.505). The repetition of “sight” as both the object and instrument of torment underscores the paradox of Satan’s condition: he cannot not-see the goodness he has lost, and the vision of it deepens his misery. His admiration for the couple’s innocence quickly curdles into bitterness, showing how Satan’s capacity for beauty is perverted by his pride. He recognizes in them what he has forfeited, yet instead of remorse, he chooses malice, stating, “To spite us more, / Our Enemy, our foe, hath left us this, / Our visible delight” (4.359–361). The plural “us” is deceptive here—Satan invokes the memory of a collective (his fallen angels), but his isolation is absolute.
By constructing Satan as both self-aware and self-deceiving, Milton crafts a complex portrait of evil rooted not in external defiance, but in internal contradiction. Satan’s tragedy is that he sees too clearly what he has lost, yet remains willfully blind to the means of redemption. In Book 4, Milton offers not a hero or even an antihero, but a fallen intellect trapped in a cycle of rationalization, whose grandeur lies in his capacity for suffering as much as in his defiance.
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