Literary Analysis

Don Juan by Lord Bryan

The genre of “Don Juan” as our literary piece is poetry. It is written in the time of Romantic period in
1800 –1837 by Lord Byron. Lord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality
captured the imagination of Europe. Although made famous by the autobiographical poem Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (1812–18)—and his many love affairs—he is perhaps better known today for the satiric realism of
Don Juan (1819–24).

Don Juan the main character lives in the Spanish town of Seville. When Don Juan has turned sixteen
he is one of the most handsome young men you will ever seen, after his father’s death, he is carefully
supervised by his mother. At the age of sixteen, he learns the art of love from Donna Julia, a young matron. Don
José and Donna Inez is the parent of Don Juan. His parents are from good families. But tend to fight all the time
and trying to make Don Juan him take their side. Donna Inez is highly educated for a woman of her time. The
problem with her is that she's a little too perfect, which makes her stuck-up. While his father Don José is, a
gallant man often unfaithful to his wife, with whom he quarrels constantly. He dies while his son is still a small
boy. His dad isn't really interested in learning or working hard. Eventually, the two are finally about to get a
divorce when Don José dies unexpectedly. The death leaves Don Juan as the heir to a pretty decent estate. He
just wanders around doing whatever he wants. Donna Julia was Don Juan’s first love. A woman of twenty-three
married to the fifty-year-old Don Alfonso. She is forced to enter a convent after her irate husband discovers his
wife and her young lover in her bedchamber. In a long letter, written on the eve of Don Juan’s departure from
Spain, she professes her undying love for him. Don Alfonso, the cuckold husband who discovers Don Juan
hiding in a closet in his wife’s bedroom. Haidée the second love of Don Juan. A tall, lovely child of nature and
passion, she finds him unconscious on the seashore following the sinking of the ship on which he had sailed
from Spain. Lambro, Haidée’s father, “the mildest- manner’ d man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.”
Returning from one of his piratical expeditions, he surprises the young lovers and sends Don Juan, wounded in
a fight with his men, away on a slave ship. Later, he regrets his hasty action when he watches his only child die
of illness and grief. Gulbeyaz is the sultana of Turkey. Having seen Don Juan in the slave market where he is
offered for sale, along with an Italian opera troupe sold into captivity by their disgusted impresario, she orders
one of the palace eunuchs to buy the young man. The sultan of Turkey, the father of fifty daughters and four
dozen sons.
 If there's one thing that Byron is willing to be serious about, it's the physical expression of love between
a guy and a girl. In moments where two characters are kissing. At the end of the day, Byron thinks of physical
love as the opposite of hypocrisy. It might even be the most genuine thing two people can do in this world. Don
Juan's boat goes down in the Mediterranean and he ends up starving in a lifeboat with some other men. The
others start eating each other but Don Juan holds back. And according to Byron, this was a good idea because
all the cannibals eventually go crazy and eventually die. Byron might be a troublemaker, but he knows his
limits. The audience of his time might have hanged him for making fun of cannibalism

Don Juan is written in groups of eight lines of iambic pentameter that follow an ABABABCC rhyme
scheme, which is known as ottava rima. The dedication, sixteen cantos, and fragmentary seventeenth canto
make up the poem, which Byron insisted was unfinished. Unfortunately, Byron died shortly after the
publication of the last cantos and was therefore unable to complete the entire mock epic. Byron becomes more
central to the poem than the young hero. Don Juan is actually a rather flat character—he is young, of a sweet
disposition, and simultaneously innocent and promiscuous. Don Juan falls into his amorous adventures, the
passive recipient of the erotic attentions of a succession of aggressive women of power. Always self-conscious
of his literary standing, Byron did not neglect to include literary and cultural criticism in his comedic epic. The
adventures of Don Juan themselves are poetic re-imaginings of Byron’s own escapades and dysfunctional
relationships with the women in his life. These make them of interest not just as poetry but also as windows into
Byron’s biography from his own point of view. Byron retells the story of Don Juan with himself as the
womanizer. Whether this long poem is a late masterpiece or self-indulgence or both remains a matter of debate.