User:Sherrilledwards/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of  Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Notes ===