The Completeness of Faust Anonymous College

The purpose of this essay is to investigate to what extent Goethe’s Urfaust can be considered a complete work, or whether its fractured nature destines it to seen only as an unfinished draft that would later become Faust part I. Crucial to understanding the contemporary perception of Urfaust is the awareness of the existence of Faust stories that circulated in German folk culture prior to Christopher Marlowe’s imagining of Doctor Faustus, and the puppet shows and chapbooks that were inspired by the aforementioned tales, which then became commonplace in Goethe’s time.

A modern reader of Urfaust is like to label it incomprehensible due to the omission of an explicit clarification of Mephistopheles’ nature and role, as indeed, he is not introduced in name, bar in the script margins, until his third scene in the Landstraße. As upon his first appearance, Mephistopheles is disguised as a professor, his re-emergence in Auerbachs Keller as an unexplained companion of Faust is ever more jarring, although his satanic nature is hinted at when he remarks, “Den Teufel vermuten die Kerls nie, so nah er ihnen immer ist”. Furthermore, there is no scene detailing his wager with Faust as there is in Faust part I. Thus, the audience is expected...