The paradoxical quest

Close comparative examination of the Faust legend and the Biblical tale of the Fall reveals an analogous paradox in the nexus of good and evil in both stories. Identifying this paradox as a quintessential sine qua non of the Faust quest, this study traces its development through the Faust tradition's four most important literary the sixteenth-century German Chapbook, and the Faust works of Christopher Marlowe, Johann W. Goethe, and Thomas Mann.