Goethe's other Faust

the long version

The Goethe who began Faust was not the poet and thinker who completed it some sixty years later. The last thirty of those years span the writing of the second part, Faust II, a work that still puzzles critics today. John Gearey shows that the themes of Faust II are markedly different from those of Faust I, a shift that reflects dramatic changes in the world around Goethe and in his own thinking. Gearey traces the antecedents of the new mode of thought that is reflected in Faust II to the developments in science related to the literary and artistic movements of our own century. Specifically, he argues that Faust II treats the theme of evolution in new, wholly conscious ways, some parallel to later 'Darwinian' science. Indeed, the more or less scientific idea of evolution determined the literary form of Faust, a form at once appropriate to that idea and evidence of faith in it.