Faust Series, Essay 3 of 5
Most dramas begin with a problem. A man in a room. A conflict brewing. A situation that needs resolving. You establish the world, introduce the characters, and let the action develop from there.
Faust does that too – but only after a Prologue, which takes place in Heaven!
God and Mephistopheles are talking. Archangels are present. The universe is described as harmony — everything working like a clock, everything in its right order. And then the devil walks in and disrupts it.
That is a deliberate structural choice. And if you read past it without stopping, you’ve missed the frame that holds the entire play together.
The Prologue in Heaven does something no earthly opening could do. It tells you, before a single human character speaks, that what follows is sanctioned. God permits the deal. Mephistopheles makes his case — human beings are unstable, easily led astray, Faust in particular can be corrupted — and God says, in effect: try. Go ahead and make My day.
Think about what the play becomes without that scene. Faust in his Gothic chamber, alone, despairing, turning to magic. It’s a story about one man’s breakdown. Interesting, perhaps. But local. Personal. The stakes are Faust’s stakes.
With the Prologue, the stakes are cosmic. This is not just Faust’s struggle. It’s our struggle.
This is a question about what human life is capable of becoming. God brings up Faust’s name. God names him as the test case. And the question being asked — in heaven, between God and the devil, before the play has even properly begun — is whether a striving man, even in confusion, remains on the right path.
That changes everything you’re about to read. About what you have read already perhaps.
The word striving becomes central to this play, and it’s worth taking seriously.
It’s not a word we use much anymore. Strive. To devote serious effort, serious energy, serious exertion toward a specific goal. To struggle against difficulty. To try hard in a way that costs something.
The Lord says it directly in the Prologue. Faust is confused, searching, unsettled — but he is striving. And that striving, God argues, keeps him on the right path even when he can’t see it.
Mephistopheles doesn’t buy it. He sees human striving as instability. As a flaw to exploit. These creatures can’t live within the order they’ve been given — he says it plainly — and their striving is not noble. It’s a vulnerability. Give them enough rope and they’ll hang themselves with it.
So they disagree. And the play is the argument.
Now — since this drama begins in heaven, I think it’s fair to look at what the Bible says about striving. I stay inside the text, and this text starts with God. So Genesis comes with it. Genesis 6:3: “My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh.” God’s spirit, striving with man. And a limit placed on it.
Faust is proof of that verse in motion. A man whose striving has outrun his own spirit’s ability to keep up with it. Who has studied everything, concluded nothing can be known, and now goes looking for the inmost force through a deal with the devil. God’s spirit striving with him — and Faust arranging his own replacement.
Think about that. The Prologue doesn’t just set the scene. It tells you what the play is really about. Not a man’s adventures with the devil. A question about the human spirit and how far striving can take you before it tips into something else.
The Book of Job lives underneath this play too, and I mentioned it in the analysis because it’s impossible to ignore. Job was a righteous man who lost everything in a test permitted by God. Sound familiar? The structure is the same. God permits the test. The adversary runs it. The human being suffers through it.
But the third-person narrator of Job tells you in the first sentence: Job was a good man. You know that going in. So everything that follows — the losses, the suffering, the friends who tell him he must have deserved it — you read against that knowledge. He didn’t deserve it. The narrator told you so. You have to believe the narrator.
Same thing here. The Prologue tells you Faust is striving toward something higher. God says so. Whatever Faust does from that point forward, you’re reading it against that frame. He’s confused. He makes a deal with the devil. He causes real harm to real people. But the frame holds: this is a man striving toward something, and God has named him as the test case for whether that striving is enough.
That’s a very different story than a morality tale about a scholar who sells his soul and pays for it.
Mephistopheles is worth examining here, too, because most readers bring the wrong version of him to this play.
In the 1587 legend — the original German booklet that started all of this — the devil is a tempter. He offers Faust worldly delights for twenty-four years, collects at the end. It’s a morality tale. Pride leads to damnation. Don’t do what Faust did.
In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the structure is similar. I read the ending of Marlowe’s version in the analysis — the clock striking midnight, Faust begging for more time, the devils tearing him apart. It’s visceral and terrifying and it makes the moral point with violence. You do not want to be Marlowe’s Faust at midnight.
Goethe’s Mephistopheles is something different. He doesn’t drag Faust into anything. He enables what Faust already wants. He’s a vehicle, not a seducer. He removes friction. He makes the next experience easier to reach. And he’s genuinely funny — sardonic, intelligent, completely clear-eyed about what he’s doing and why.
But here’s what matters most about him in the context of the Prologue: he doesn’t deny God. He doesn’t attack creation. He doesn’t argue that heaven is wrong or that the archangels are mistaken. His focus is entirely on human beings. And his argument is not that humans are evil. His argument is that humans are unstable — that they can’t live within the order they’ve been given.
Does he have our number? He might. Since Adam and Eve, right? They couldn’t follow orders either. I gotta do something else, I gotta know what I’m not supposed to know — that’s been the human problem from the beginning.
The Prologue puts that argument on the table. The rest of the play tests it.
What this structure demands of us as readers is something most people are reluctant to give: trust in the narrator.
This is a third-person narration. The narrator is outside the story. Not Faust telling it, not God telling it, not Mephistopheles. An anonymous narrator reporting what happens. And with third-person narration, you have no choice. You have to believe the narrator. The moment you start doubting the narrator, the story collapses. Nothing holds.
So when the narrator tells you God and the devil had a conversation in heaven about Faust — you believe it. When the narrator tells you Faust is striving — you believe it. When the narrator tells you, at the end, that a voice from heaven declares Margaret saved — you believe it.
The Prologue is where that trust is established. Before a single earthly scene. Before Faust opens his mouth. You are told, by a reliable narrator reporting from heaven, what this story is about and what’s at stake.
Start there. Everything else follows.
Read Essay 4: Rolling the Rock — Faust, Sisyphus, and What It Means to Strive