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Similarities Between Paradise Lost And The Animatrix

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Recommended: Satan as a villain in paradise lost

Kaitlyn Park #19
Aguilar
British Literature/Period 1
22 February 2018
Freedom Fighter vs. Terrorist: A Case Study on Paradise Lost and The Matrix
Both Paradise Lost and The Animatrix recount a story in which the antagonist can be seen as a terrorist or freedom fighter, depending on the audience’s perspective and any of the many philosophical ideas present in both works. Both plots exhibit that entity, who is regarded as evil, but provide an explanation for their seemed “evil” by showing what caused each entity, the machines and Satan, to wage a war on the protagonists, humanity, in The Animatrix, and God, in Paradise Lost. Through the philosophy of ethics, more specifically the study of morality, which questions what is moral or “good” and …show more content…

In the biblical epic Paradise Lost, God offers free will to humans but denies this freedom to His angels. Satan demonstrates his outrage at this by waging war against God and inspiring other angels to join him in taking up arms against the tyrannical God. Satan refuses to be subservient to a dictator that forces His creation to comply with His commands and offers no free will. Satan is seen as the heroic figure that fights to free himself and others from being enslaved by God, who keeps the angels in captivity by forcing them to do as He commands. The reader, who has most likely experienced or seen oppression in his or her life, is caused to sympathize with Satan and his struggle for liberation. The reader is compelled to identify tyranny, or God’s reign, as bad and Satan’s fight for free will as an enslaved angel, as good. Again, the “evil” entity’s reason for fighting is moral and good. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s reason for rebelling against God is justified because he is not rebelling for the sake of rebelling or spreading chaos and violence, but for the sake of freedom and therefore can be seen as a freedom fighter, rather than a …show more content…

The audience is forced to confront their own ideas of good and bad by acknowledging objective moral truth. Fighting for freedom and truth is moral in any situation and applies to both works, which proves both Satan and the machines are freedom fighters with a just cause and moral values, rather than terrorists who rebell for the sake of defiance and disorder. Setting this standard for objective morality helps prevent corruption and allows people to identify morality, or what is good and bad, not from their own devices and desires, but from morality’s inherent goodness.

Works Cited
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition, vol. 1.
Ed. Abrams, M.H. Norton & Company: New York, 1993. 554,565-566,741, 744-745.
Print.
Wachowski, Lana, Lilly Wachowski, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne
Moss. The Matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999.
Wachowski, Lilly, Lana Wachowski, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Andrew R. Jones, Mahiro Maeda,
Shinichirō Watanabe, Koji Morimoto, and Peter Chung. The Animatrix. United States:
Warner Home Video,

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