Francis Bacon: Essays and Major Works Literary Elements

Essays, philosophical treatise, utopian fiction

17th-century England

The majority of Bacon's major works are written from a first-person collective perspective. The New Atlantis, his incomplete utopian novel, is written from the first-person perspective of an unnamed European traveler.

Contemplative, moralizing, inquisitive, speculative

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An overarching conflict within a number of Bacon's major works is that Bacon is imagining a process of learning and knowledge acquisition that does not yet exist. As such, a his work is largely dedicated to refuting the claims of other philosophers and encouraging his readers to pursue a new mode of conceptualizing humanity and society.

The New Atlantis, being the only major work of Bacon's in the fiction genre, is also the only text with a discernible climax. Given the fact that the text is incomplete, the climax of The New Atlantis occurs when the narrator is granted a private audience with the Father of Salomon's House, who proceeds to divulge the entire structure of Salomon's House to the narrator.

In The New Atlantis, Bacon foreshadows his argument about the coexistence of science and religion when it is discovered that the island's natives are Christians.

Bacon writes with a straightforward, scientific tone in most of his nonfiction essays. As such, his texts are largely devoid of both understatement and hyperbole, reflecting his interest in facts and describing things simply as they are.

Bacon's work makes frequent allusions to past philosophers to whom Bacon is indebted – most notably Plato, but also Aristotle and Socrates. The Advancement of Learning also alludes to a more recent philosopher and clergyman, Martin Luther, who was the seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation.

Important imagery throughout Bacon's work includes the tribe or the community, the cave, darkness and lightness, and trees as metaphors for types of knowledge.

An important paradox in Bacon's work is his argument that one's beliefs can often blind them to reality, thereby hindering their advancement of knowledge. Simultaneously, though, Bacon argues for a dedicated Christianity and unyielding belief in God. While some might see this as a paradox, Bacon perceives the existence of God and a God-guided pursuit of knowledge as absolute fact rather than belief.

In The New Atlantis, the narrator engages with a series of interlocutors who all offer a different – though always laudatory – perspective of their island. These interlocutors are presented as parallel characters, as they are all vastly different (one of them is even Jewish) but have still come to find happiness in Bensalem, emphasizing its utopian nature.

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In his essays, Bacon frequently personifies sins and other unsavory passions as having minds of their own. These passions – like envy and praise – are portrayed as evil forces with the power to destroy the man who experiences them.