Don’t do it! : Reader response in John Milton’s Paradise Lost

This thesis will engage in the three crisis episodes that I call Don’t Do It moments in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, moments in which the poem suddenly turns into a
suspense movie. As in a slasher film, or even a mystery film, the reader responds
emotionally as the poem brings him or her to relive the seduction that leads to the fall of
man. I will argue that Milton deliberately organizes the entire poem around these
moments in Book IX in order to recreate the Fall in the reader’s mind, emphasizing it’s
unfairness and inevitability: the readers suffering for Adam and Eve’s sin. I will suggest a connection between the text and the reader by means of empty signifiers. Unlike Adam and Eve, the reader understands the meaning of the word ‘death’ and the powerful consequences they will face once they separate and fall.