Faust, Part One

The first part of Faust and its premise is largely defined by Faust’s struggle between reason and the intellectual background he comes from, and passion and feeling. At the start of the play, Faust is restless and discontented with his scholarly pursuits, and he strikes his deal with Mephistopheles in hopes of getting a life driven by passion and feeling instead of words and teaching: “Books sicken me, I’ll learn no more./ Now let us slake hot passions in,” Faust tells Mephistopheles (I.7.1749-50), adding that he wants to feel the full range of human emotion. Through the rest of the play, Faust is largely driven by passion and feeling, rather than reason and logic—most notably through his lustful pursuit of Gretchen, even though it brings about her downfall and results in the deaths of her mother and brother.

On the other side of the feeling versus reason debate is Wagner, who represents the reason-centric ideals espoused during the Age of Enlightenment that took place when Goethe started writing Faust. Unlike Faust, Wagner gets fulfillment through words and intellectualism, telling Faust that while he gets tired of nature, “the pursuit of intellectual things/ From book to book, from page to page—what joys that yields!” (I.