The idea of teleology is exemplified best in Paradise Lost, in which God is omniscient and therefor knows the outcome of the story but continues along the same path anyway. In this way God is creating the future he sees. In this text Milton likens himself to God through the use of the omniscient perspective. Milton is setting himself up as the creator and manipulator of this story, in the same way all authors dictate the stories they create, thereby becoming the gods of their own world.

Teleology is the idea that all choices are predetermined, and how can an author begin a story without knowing what they are going to write. Virtually every story is planned before being written; the author can write whatever they choose, creating a narrative that they personally approve of. This is part of the reason reality is so hard to capture in literature, because what is written is idealized by the author, becoming what the author wants it to be. When the story begins there is only one course of events that can occur, the course that the author has chosen. Foreshadowing is present in each many of the works we studied, referring to “so inglorious an end” in the letter preceding Oroonoko, the idea of the wyrd or fate in Beowulf that cannot be escaped, and most prevalent in God’s awareness of the future in Paradise Lost. Authors use foreshadowing to justify their ending to the readers, so the author can support the idea that this is the outcome that was going to occur all along.