“The One Who Knocks”: Milton’s Lucifer and the American Tragic Character

Abstract

In his classic work Love and Death in the American Novel, the critic Leslie Fiedler argued that there exists a “dimly perceived need of many Americans to have their national existence projected in terms of a compact with the Devil.” For scholars like Fiedler and Leo Marx the American experience could be conceived of as a type of Faustian bargain, the gaining of an earthly paradise at the expense of previous innocence. Perhaps no literary character embodies these contradictions like John Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, and perhaps no character has been more borrowed by canonical American literature to stand-in for the national character. The devil as depicted in Paradise Lost is a consummate and archetypal “American.” This chapter looks at how this type of character is the dominant one of American literature, focusing on that most Miltonic of creations, Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and investigating his appearance in modern texts, notably as Tony Soprano in David Chase’s The Sopranos, Don Draper in Mathew Weiner’s Mad Men, and most notably as Walter White in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. All of these characters are consummate Americans and embodiments of the current period’s “angry white men.”