Pointing the Finger in Paradise LostAfter the fall in Milton's Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve bicker and blame each other for their decent. First, Adam accuses Eve for her physical act of accepting Satan's apple and eating it, thereby defying God's decree not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. In retaliation, Eve responds and attempts not only to justify her action, but also to place the blame on Adam. Eve's reaction is typical of someone who doesn't like to admit they're wrong. Eve begins by challenging Adam by arguing that he would have done the same thing if he had been in her situation. “[If you had] been there, / Or here the attempt, you could not have discerned / Fraud in the Serpent, speaking as he spoke” (IX 1148-1150). She tries to justify her action in Adam's mind by making him understand that he would have acted the same way, and in fact she also hopes to gain his sympathy. This tactic is often effective because we don't tend to choose to recognize the faults of others when we realize that we are likely to make the same mistakes. Aristotle recognizes the relationship between arousing sympathy and getting the audience to identify with the situation in his Poetics when he describes the ideal character as one who is "true to life" (81). The audience must be able to identify with a character in free fall, otherwise they will not feel sorry for their fate. In other words, if a speaker wants sympathy from his audience, he must make them “feel their pain.” Eve continues her rebuttal by justifying her action based on the circumstances of the scenario. She argues: “No motive for enmity between us is known, / Why should I seek to harm” (II 1151-1152). She seems to imply that a less confident person would not have listened to the se...... middle of paper...... accusation that he did not try hard enough to keep her in line sides when he asks: "What more could I have?/I warned you, I reprimanded you, predicted/The danger and the lurking Enemy/Who awaited me" (IX 1170-1172). No matter how developed one part of Aristotle's triangle seems, it is useless without the other two parts. If you step back and observe this scene from Paradise Lost with your own experiences in mind, you realize how insignificant the "blame game" is. maybe. Eve strives to use persuasion as a “finger-pointing” tool in order to alleviate her own guilt. However, she fails. We all need to know how it feels to fail in an argument, but we still sometimes experience situations like these when we don't want to accept full responsibility for something that went wrong. Works Cited Milton, John. Paradise lost. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.