Comparing Ariel And Caliban And William Shakespeare's The Tempest

700 Words2 Pages

Many popular television shows and movies or stories have scenes where an angel appears on one shoulder and a devil appears on the other. The devil will persuade the protagonist or, the ego in psychoanalytic lens, to do the wrong or impulsive thing. And the angel persuades the protagonist to do the right or rational thing. It has been used time and time again because its meaning is deeply rooted in a more sophisticated psychoanalysis of the struggle within a person to follow the moral compass or to succumb to impulse. Nowhere in Shakespeare 's plays are two more sharply contrasted characters than Ariel and Caliban. The two are equally preternatural; Ariel the spirit of the air and Caliban the spirit of the earth. Ariel in his nature and being is a lively, melodically and bubbly type of personality. He has just enough of human-heartedness to to know how he would feel if he were a human and has the sense of gratitude a normal human would. Though as long as he remembers his obligations, …show more content…

Ariel finds the prospect of being dealt a punishment of his worst nightmare to be a wakeup call to which he responds quickly by correcting his behavior. This shows Ariel’s ability to recognize when he has wronged someone else. This is a critical characteristic that separates Ariel as the superego and Caliban as the id. Without being in any proper sense human, Caliban represents, both in body and soul, a sort of intermediate nature between man and brute. Though he has all the attributes of humanity from morality downwards, so that his nature touches and borders upon the sphere of moral life, the result is that it brings him to recognize moral law only as making for self. The real meaning behind that morality is too deep for Caliban to comprehend and thus is lost to him. He has intelligence of seeming wrong in what is done to him, but no conscience of what is wrong in his own

Open Document