The Sorrows of Young Werther Author: Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Summary by EdomDawit
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe is the epitome of Romanticism who ushered in the passionate artistic themes of the eighteenth century, addressing the somehow untouchable topics of the time ranging from unrequited
love to self destruction to suicide. In The Sorrows of Young Werther, he touches the flame of extreme
despair in the human condition when the individual, in this case young Werther, is faced with a bitter sense of nothingness and triviality. Still, in the face of misery and biting reality, he clings to the unruly desires of an eternal lover. Goethe masterfully weaves this conflict to make up a catching narrative of an individual’s emotional fortress against failure until ‘defeat’ becomes unavoidable. Yet, unlike David against Goliath, he had to keep throwing his ‘stones’ until the last one on which is written, ‘death be not proud’. And Werther commits
suicide in such a quixotic manner that his despair in his unrequited love seems atoned by something beyond and above love. Perhaps, intense suffering can be a shaky but only bridge leading to a rebirth of the human
spirit regardless of the carnal disappointment of unfulfilled dreams. More than two centuries pass on; and enter Sarah Kane. Psychosis, Kane’s last play, was completed only a week before she hanged herself and she described the play as, ‘highly personal’. Psychosis was inspired by Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and it ends with the suicide of a young woman. What a parallel! As Ernest Becker once said, “Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?”
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