Angels and Demons Trivia Quiz

Answer: Faust

The name Mephistopheles is famous and generally means a person associated with lies. In Greek it actually meant a person who didn't love light. Many readers have found that perhaps he is not so much Faust's opposite as his alter ego, perhaps a doppelganger. Goethe's Faust has two parts: Part I and Part II. In Part I, Faust makes his deal with the Devil, who incidentally can turn into a poodle.

'The Sorrows of Young Werther', with the immediacy of an epistolary form, became a international classic about about the feelings of a young artist.
Mann's 'Death in Venice' explores issues of death and homosexual love.
'The Tin Drum' by Günter Grass is a shatteringly honest exploration of the disturbing life of Oskar Matzerath.

Answer: Young Goodman Brown

In 'Young Goodman Brown', the Devil appears to Goodman Brown in many forms, among them as an old man. All the people Goodman Brown knows become by story's end converted to the Devil's side, including his wife, who is ironically named Faith. The story abounds in dark imagery, including staffs, the encumbering darkness of the wilderness and people's frightening whispering.

Faulkner's celebrated 1939 story, 'Barn Burning', explores the history of barn burning on the part of Abner Snopes, in a story replete with courtroom drama, tension within the Snopes family and a move toward adulthood on the part of Sartoris Snopes, his son. Abner Snopes is a rather mechanical character, driven to violence and revenge, with internal psychological damage and a hand 'like a curled claw'.
'The Birthmark', is the classic Hawthorne story about a desire to find utter perfection. In this way it is related in its spirit to 'Frankenstein'.
'Good Country People' is Flannery O'Connor stinging rebuke of country people as sometimes being anything but good.

Answer: Paradise Lost

William Blake commented later that Milton most likely was sympathetic to the Devil. Much has been made of this interpretation to explain the intense power of Milton's writing.

'Brigadoon' is the name of the 1954 musical presenting a Scottish place which appears once every hundred years. 'An American Tragedy' is the wonderful 1925 novel with Theodore Dreiser which dramatizes an entrapment by money, which led to murder, a fascination with money which some might call a demonic force in American culture, especially in the times before the Stock Market Crash. 'The Dunciad' is a famous Neo-Classical satire written by Alexander Pope.

Answer: Anne Rice

In 'Memnoch the Devil', the fifth volume in Anne Rice's 'The Vampire Chronicle', Lestat comes to make his own fascinating pact with Memnoch. The following conversation shows the ambiguity of the entire question of evil: "...You are the Devil. Yes. But you're not evil? Why?....Completely irrelevant question. Or let me put it a little more mysteriously. It's completely unnecessary for me to be evil...."

Philip Roth is the American author famous for his Jewish-American fiction such as 'Portnoy's Complaint' and novels featuring his famous character Nathan Zuckerman. Stan Rice, poet and painter, was Anne Rice's husband. Elmer Rice is the American playwright famous in particular for 'The Adding Machine'.

Answer: The Divine Comedy

Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' is an epic of three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in 14, 233 lines. Lucifer is presented as three headed with wings under the chins. These wings blow a penetrating and deathly cold which is so powerful that all the regions of hell are chilled by it.

Italo Servo, 'Zeno's Conscience' is the 1923 retrospective account of one Zeno Cosini who is remembering his life on his psychiatrist's orders.
Boccaccio's 'Decameron' is a fascinating 14th century frame story taking up ten days with 100 tales by recounted by 10 people. It takes place during the dramatic years of the Black Death which adds drama to these stories about love, gallantry, death and mating.
Pirandello's 'Naked Masks' (1952) includes five plays which each look into personal identity and the differences between characters and their author.

Answer: The Mysterious Stranger

Mark Twain's incomplete manuscript of 'The Mysterious Stranger' was an explicit reference to the forces of evil, and, more specifically, to the Devil. The following sentence is from Chapter Two of the manuscript: "They were going to examine her, but she stopped them, and confessed straight off that her power was from the Devil."

Stephen Crane's 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky' splendidly tells of Jack Potter who secretly got married with no regard for his town's customs, and brought his bride back to his home town.
William Golding's 1954 'The Lord of the Flies' dramatizes what can happen to otherwise civilized people when completely isolated from social restraints.
In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 'Blood Meridian', Tobin sees that the judge is more than familiar with symbols of the Devil. As often in contemporary renditions of the evil, things become ambiguous. Evil is not presented, simply, as all bad.

Answer: Peer Gynt

'Peer Gynt' by Henrik Ibsen is a fascinatingly provocative piece of writing. It is yet another one of the many times when the lines between good and evil, devil and angel are conflated.

'Madame Bovary' is Gustav Flaubert's classic study of Emma Bovary, whose final dependence upon money and romantic love cost her everything.
'The Ugly Duckling', the 1844 fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, dramatizes the ostracism which the ugly often face. One joy of this story is the transformation of the duckling into a beautiful swan. Often, images of the Devil render him deformed and terrible.
'Ghosts' is the 1881 play by Henrik Ibsen regarding the difficult role of venereal disease in polite society. The 'ghosts' of the title refer to the secrets people insist on keeping.

Answer: Man and Superman

Interestingly, when the play was performed in May, 1905, they cut Act III, the very act in which the conversation with the Devil takes place.
Shaw apparently took this play much more seriously than many others did. He wanted to develop in a profound way Nietsche's idea of the 'Übermensch', or the Superman.

'Death of a Salesman' is Arthur Miller's classic play about Willy Loman, a salesman.
'Desire Under the Elms' is Eugene O'Neill's study of passion hitherto repressed.
'Strange Interlude' is Eugene O'Neill's 1923 highly experimental play concerning insanity, sexual love and abortion.

Answer: I, Lucifer

'I, Lucifer' is Glen Duncan's 2003 book which depicts Lucifer, with the fallen angel's being given another chance by God to lead a sin-free life.

'The Devil and Daniel Webster' is a short story by Stephen Foster Benet concerning the New England farmer Jabez Stone, who seeks to be rescued from his compact with the Devil. Daniel Webster will appear to try to save him. At the end, there is a jury trial, Stone is acquitted, the union is saved and the Devil disappears.
'The Brothers Karamazov' is Dostoevsky's classic work in which Ivan has a famous meeting with the Devil. Ivan even throws a cup at the Devil. The novel famously questions the entire issue of religious belief.
'The Litanies of Satan' is a penetrating, morally brutal, section in 'The Flowers of Evil' by the stunningly original Charles Baudelaire.

Answer: angels

'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread' is a line from Alexander Pope's 'An Essay on Criticism.'

It's amazing when we think about the history of Western literature, anyway, how many of the greatest works have allusions to or appearance of the demonic in them.