著者

山口 裕美

出版者

英米文化学会

雑誌

英米文化 (ISSN:09173536)

巻号頁・発行日

no.43, pp.47-63, 2013-03-31

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This paper aims to show that Byron tries to give a new interpretation of Cain in Genesis. The protagonist in Cain is possessed by despairs, which Kierkegaard would call "the sickness unto death." His Faustian impulse, which is the desire to get the ultimate knowledge, would result from the anxiety where he cannot identify who he is in the world. Yet, by having knowledge beyond the human realm, he would break a Christian taboo: he would commit the sin of pride, which is one of the seven deadly sins. It is natural that the protagonist such as Cain should be cast into Hell as Satan in Paradise Lost in the traditional Christian view. However, if the Christian conception of good and evil should overturn as in the Nietzschean thought, the protagonist's anxiety would become existentialistic. In analyzing Byron's Cain in comparison with the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, this paper tries to see Byron not as one of the later Romantics but rather as a pre-existentialistic poet.