“Faust” (post 3) by Goethe (post 5): Why is Part Two a non sequitur? Goethe didn’t know. Then who did know?

Part 1 ends when Faust’s beloved has been imprisoned for killing their out-of-wedlock child. Faust goes to free her. She refuses to flee with him. And as a “voice from above” (God) says, “She is saved!” (1, p. 167), Faust leaves with Mephistopheles.

Part 2, according to this edition’s Notes, is a non sequitur. “The change of scene in passing from Part One to Two is shocking: from a night-shrouded death cell to an Alpine field of flowers bathed in a soft twilight…The common reader, turning to it from Part One, is dismayed, the uncommon reader as well. Whatever is going on? It defies all rules, with royal indifference…Goethe is reported by J. F. Eckermann, his Boswell, as saying, ‘It would have been a fine thing indeed if I had strung so rich, so varied and diversified a life as I have exhibited in Faust upon the slender string of one pervading idea.’ ‘What does it mean,’ people came and asked him. ‘As if I knew myself,’ was his reply” (1, pp. 453-454).

The alternate personality, who did know, but was not asked, did not explain.

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.

Added same day: The above is an example of what I have previously called a "split inconsistent narrative." Search it for discussions related to other works.

Later same day: I could not get interested in Part Two.