delit1-5, Exercise 3: Goethe's Faust and the Faust book

Model answer (check the details):

The bargain: in the 1587 book Faust makes a contract with the devil for knowledge, power and pleasure for a term of years. In Goethe's play Faust makes a wager with Mephistopheles: if the devil can ever give him a moment so satisfying that he wants it to last, Faust will be lost. It is a bet about striving, not a simple sale of the soul.

The hero's fate: in the book Faust is carried off to hell at the end of the term. In Goethe's play Faust is saved at the end, a surprising outcome that readers interpret in different ways (grace, striving, irony).

The message: the book is a Protestant warning against curiosity and magic. Goethe's play treats ambition, knowledge, love and guilt more openly (the Gretchen tragedy in Part One), and asks what a striving human being is and what counts as redemption.

Result: Goethe kept the legend's framework and changed its meaning.