In examining Stanley Fish’s article, “Surprised by Sin: the Reader in Paradise Lost,” our class discussed the different ways in which writers interact with their readers and attempt to incite a particular reader-response from them. Of course, each reader has their own unique reading experience, and each reader brings with them their own individual intentions and beliefs, so the reader-response will be different for every reader in some facet. The same reader usually even has a significantly different reader-response when analyzing the same text for a second time. There are still however, main points and ideas that are driven home by the writer that in some way or another will be analyzed similarly by multiple readers. In Paradise Lost, Fish argues that John Milton is attempting to both educate and humiliate his readers through subverting the reader’s expectations and questioning his own stances.
Fish claims that “Milton consciously wants to worry his reader, to force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence in his own perception is its focus” (Fish, 4). I believe in Milton’s strategy of filling his readers with doubt that he is teaching them the importance of questioning themselves as well as authority. In this case, Milton is the authority as the writer of Paradise Lost, and guides the reader in their thinking but knows that while he can present his own ideas, they can be interpreted in a multitude of ways by different readers.
From Fish’s perspective, Milton seems to be very consciously aware of his readers throughout Paradise Lost. Fish uses Milton’s harassment of his reader as an example of his interaction with the reader. The reader is set up to believe one thing and then becomes disappointed with the shock that their expectation was subverted. An example of this is the character of Satan, who readers first assume to be purely evil but then are intrigued by his human-like interior struggles. Even though Satan is the villain of the story, he is immediately shown as an underdog with outstanding qualities of leadership and resilience. By unsettling his readers through his break of traditional epic molds and making his opinions ambiguous, Milton gives power to the reader to interpret the text the way they want to.
The center of Paradise Lost’s subject is in fact the reader, because as Milton states at the beginning of the epic, he hopes to “justify the ways of God to men” (Milton). Milton uses Paradise Lost as a creative way to open readers’ minds up to questioning authority and seeing things through different lenses. In my opinion, at least some form of reader-response criticism would need to be used to have an accurate analysis of Paradise Lost since Milton is so in tune with the importance of his text as an event that occurs within the reader rather than an object.

Works Cited:
“Surprised by Sin – Stanley Fish.” – Stanley Fish | Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press, 2008.