Abstract
In The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe shows the dangerous extremes to which Rousseauian confession can lead. Augustinian praise of God becomes praise of nature, and in the end, Werther absorbs nature into himself, collapsing external nature into internal nature. During the course of his unhappy love affair, Werther grows solipsistic, judging all things by his feelings for them. Unable to control his feelings, Werther becomes so alienated from himself that he resorts to suicide. His “confession” is actually an attempt at final self-justification and reveals his true guilt to be that of idolatry. He has worshiped Lotte and ultimately his own longings at the expense of God, and thus, theologically his suicide represents a failure to praise God and a failure to confess sin.
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Sykes, J.D. (2018). The Sorrows of Young Werther: Confessions Without Confession. In: God and Self in the Confessional Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91322-3_3
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