The Evil In Washington Irving's Adventure Of The German Student

In the story, Adventure of the German Student, the author, Washington Irving, incorporates many details that causes the audience to feel a certain way towards the story. Irving utilizes several pieces of evidence that leads the reader to think about where the evil of the story really lies. There are 3 different paths that the evil lies in: with Wolfgang himself, Satan’s “trick”, and the outbreak of the French Revolution. With this in mind, although the evil does take place in all 3 of those categories, the particular evil in this story actually lies within Satan’s trick on Wolfgang. To being with, Wolfgang was originally from a good family and he also studied a lot and wandered into wild and speculative doctrines that made others bewildered.
Those dreams lasted so long that it “haunted [his] mind..”(Irving 4). Thus, Satan is playing a trick on Wolfgang and is causing him to act in a way that is considered mad. In addition, knowing that Wolfgang was obsessed with women, Satan pulled a trick on Wolfgang by showing him a “shadowy form” of a female which was the “very face that had haunted him in his dreams.”(Irving 4). Now was this evil or not? Satan practically used Wolfgang’s weakness against him. Moreover, Satan also played with Wolfgang’s mind when he made the female say, “I have no friend..”(Irving 4). This made Wolfgang even more excited because it felt like he was finally meeting his soulmate, but little did he know that it was actually just a prank by Satan. Last, when Wolfgang observed the female in his room, he saw that she had “a singular expression approaching almost to wildness.”(Irving 5). He was so fascinated by her charms that he felt there was “a spell upon his thoughts and senses...he could not tear himself from her..”(Irving 5). With this being said, Wolfgang kind of had a feeling something was too perfect to be true, however, he didn’t think further about it nor doubted himself and instead he just continued to love