One often reads a book or watches a movie and finds a specific meaning behind the whole story, a moral. After watching American Beauty it is easy to see a resemblance in the characters to that of Paradise Lost. In this way you could say that by reading Paradise Lost the characters in American Beauty could have related and changed the way they handled their situations. In particular, Lester Burnham could have saved his life if he had only read Paradise Lost. Today society is constructed around the notion that happiness is found through material success: a rewarding big-money job, a nice house in a quiet neig