Milton identifies with Satan...

Satan Unbound

Plate 12: PL 3.739-741

"... toward the coast of Earth beneath,

Down from th' Ecliptic, sped with hop'd success,

Throws his steep flight in many an Aerie wheele,

Nor staid, till on Niphates top he lights."

(Image from George Klawitter's "The Iconography of Paradise Lost": Illustrations by Gustave Doré)

In the introductory lines to Book 3 of Paradise Lost, Milton addresses the "holy light" (PL 3.1) with these words:

Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight [ 15 ]
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes then to th' Orphean Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend, [ 20 ]
Though hard and rare: (PL 3.13-21)

Milton as narrator refers to himself and his own escape from the "Stygian Pool." According to the note supplied at Dartmouth's Milton Reading Room, by the term "Stygian," Milton is:

Referring to the river Styx, one of the rivers of Hell, found at the entrance to Hades. Also used in general reference to the underworld of classical mythology. Milton's narrator says that he has left the Hell of books 1 and 2, and now ascends to descrption of heaven, as if he were, as Dante imagines making such a journey himself in Purgatorio 1. 1-9.

In making his escape, Milton has flown through "utter and through middle darkness," which means through "Hell and Chaos," precisely the escape and path that Satan took, as Milton has just described in Book 2.

The effect of these lines is to identify Milton with Satan. Why would Milton want to do this?

Stanley Fish, in the opening to Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 1997), suggests a direction of thought:

I. Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling: 1. The Defects of Our Hearers.

I would like to suggest something about Paradise Lost that is not new except for the literalness with which the point will be made: (1) the poem's centre of reference is its reader who is also its subject; (2) Milton's purpose is to educate the reader to an awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man, and to a sense of the distance which separates him from the innocence once his; (3) Milton's method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem's scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam's troubled clarity, that is to say, 'not deceived.'

As is well known, Fish argues that Milton wishes to make us re-experience the fall of Adam by getting us as readers to identify with Satan, a point that Edward T. Oakes explicates clearly in presenting Fish's thesis:

According to his thesis, the reader is supposed to feel drawn to Satan, for from Adam and Eve we have all inherited an inclination to find Satan's sin attractive. Not to feel drawn to the figure of Lucifer means that one is not feeling the tug of original sin, an impossibility in Milton’s theology. But by reading the epic while feeling the undertow of Satan’s mesmerizing defiance of God, the reader also ends up reenacting the Fall, including the chastening experience of finding out, after the fact, how dreary and disappointing evil can be. ("Stanley Fish's Milton," First Things 117 (November 2001): 23-34)

But to get us as readers to identify with Satan, Milton does more than rely on our fallen nature's attraction to sin. He forces us, linguistically -- using the first-person "I" -- to identify with himself as narrator identifying himself with Satan. This linguistic identification in Book 3 reinforces our experience in Book 2 of escaping with Satan from Hell by way of Chaos.

Up until this point, Satan, Milton, and thus we ourselves have been heroic, but things are about to change in the books that follow as we get to know Satan, and ourselves, a little bit better.

Or a little bit worse...