Throughout the book of Frankenstein, the creator of the being Frankenstein, Victor, is experienced as a suffering being. He recalls from the very beginning a time during his childhood where he was happy and surrounded by love, a time when his mother lived. Victor’s downfall or the beginning of his disgrace, initiates with the death of his mother. Victor leaves his family to start a new stage in his life, he leaves on quest for answers a true quest for knowledge. Personal motivation will lead Victor to take on the challenge of overcoming death, or to be more specific, give life to a dead body.
This challenge which brewed deep within Victor makes him forget about his own life and leads him into isolation and a complete concentration on project. Blinded by his quest, Victor is unable to measure the consequences of what he is trying to do. Victor returns home feeling frustrated and feeling as though all his hard work had ended in the utmost failure. In addition, Victor feels guilty, realizing that his creation is the cause of his little brother’s death. During this time, he also encounters that an innocent victim, Justine, is sentenced and condemned, a person of great significance, someone like a sister, to the love of his life, Elizabeth. In analyzing the following paragraph, the reader is able to see the difficulty that Victor has in expressing his emotions.
I could not answer, “No Justine,” said Elizabeth, “he is more convinced of your innocence than I was, for even when he heard that you had confessed, he did not credit it.”
Victor initiated this paragraph with his own statement, “I could not answer,” he could have started with Elizabeth’s expressions, but chose not to. He wanted to affirm his frustration and show his ...
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...ere are various examples of suffering in different characters due to their predicaments or the circumstances by which they are surrounded. Mary Shelley is trying to show that suffering in general emotion for many different types of people, she makes emphasis on the fact that suffering is a consequence due to the individual’s actions. Victor was suffering due to the ambitions of his ultimate challenge.
Work cited
Shelley, Mary W. (2005). “Frankenstein.” Kansas: Digireads.com Publishing. Chapters 8, 21.
Unknown. “Loss of Innocence in Frankenstein.” 123HelpMe.com. Retrieved March 20, 2010 from https://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=14626>.
Jones, Chris. “Major Themes in Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.” Published July 24, 2008. Retrieved March 20, 2010 from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/796197/major_themes_in_frankenstein_by_mary.html
Victor’s obsession with the genesis of life prevents him from thinking clearly. Initially, Victor has a strong interest in science. However, during his time at Ingolstadt, when he becomes interested in the cause of the generation of life, he decides to create and animate a human being. He completely neglects his family and friends because his sole focus is on his creation. Victor prioritizes the creation of his creature over his own health and happiness. Since he works in complete secrecy, there is nobody to help him stop his obsession. In addition, there is nobody who can monitor the aesthetic quality of his creation. He is so fixed on completing his project that he fails to notice how ugly it is. As soon as the creature comes to life, Victor is so horrified and disgusted with it that he runs away. He feels like “the beauty of [his] dream [va...
In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley highlights on the experiences her characters undergo through the internal war of passion and responsibility. Victor Frankenstein lets his eagerness of knowledge and creating life get so out of hand that he fails to realize what the outcome of such a creature would affect humankind. Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, highlights on how Frankenstein’s passion of knowledge is what ultimately causes the decline of his health and the death of him and his loved ones.
Before leaving Victor, his mother died of scarlet fever, and the family was left in the care of Frankensteins Elizabeth. Victor zealously took up the study. It turned out that the work of medieval alchemists who was fond of the young man, hopelessly outdated, so he had to study modern science, especially chemistry, with the basics. After two years, Victor has achieved great success. Fascinated by physiology, he decided to identify "where lurk start in life," and soon reached his goal - to open a way to revive the lifeless matter. To apply the knowledge in practice, he gathered from various parts of the body found in the morgues, tombs and in slaughterhouses. Victor dreamed of a perfect being, a new breed of
Being isolated and separated from other people for a prolonged amount of time, can gradually make a person miserable. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is a martyr for Shelley’s view that a lack of human connections leads to misery. Victor being from a highly respected and distinguished
In this essay I am going to answer ‘how and why does Mary Shelley make the reader sympathise with the character of the monster in her novel Frankenstein’.
"Major Themes in Frankenstein." Major Themes in Frankenstein. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 May 2014. .
The most prevalent theme in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is that of obsession. Throughout the novel there are constant reminders of the struggles that Victor Frankenstein and his monster have endured. Many of their problems are brought upon by themselves by an obsessive drive for knowledge, secrecy, fear, and ultimately revenge.
In Frankenstein, Victor’s monster suffers much loneliness and pain at the hands of every human he meets, as he tries to be human like them. First, he is abandoned by his creator, the one person that should have accepted, helped, and guided him through the confusing world he found himself in. Next, he is shunned wherever he goes, often attacked and injured. Still, throughout these trials, the creature remains hopeful that he can eventually be accepted, and entertains virtuous and moral thoughts. However, when the creature takes another crushing blow, as a family he had thought to be very noble and honorable abandons him as well, his hopes are dashed. The monster then takes revenge on Victor, killing many of his loved ones, and on the humans who have hurt him. While exacting his revenge, the monster often feels guilty for his actions and tries to be better, but is then angered and provoked into committing more wrongdoings, feeling self-pity all the while. Finally, after Victor’s death, the monster returns to mourn the death of his creator, a death he directly caused, and speaks about his misery and shame. During his soliloquy, the monster shows that he has become a human being because he suffers from an inner conflict, in his case, between guilt and a need for sympathy and pity, as all humans do.
When Victor died, the monster wept over his body. “‘But soon,’ he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct,’” (277). This quote from the monster exhibits the void he felt after Victor died. The realization that his creator is dead becomes too much to bear for him, so he proclaims that he will die. This is symbolic to Mary Shelley’s real life.
An idea becomes a vision, the vision develops a plan, and this plan becomes an ambition. Unfortunately for Victor Frankenstein, his ambitions and accomplishments drowned him in sorrow from the result of many unfortunate events. These events caused Victors family and his creation to suffer. Rejection and isolation are two of the most vital themes in which many dreadful consequences derive from. Victor isolates himself from his family, friends, and meant-to-be wife. His ambitions are what isolate him and brought to life a creature whose suffering was unfairly conveyed into his life. The creature is isolated by everyone including his creator. He had no choice, unlike Victor. Finally, as the story starts to change, the creature begins to take control of the situation. It is now Victor being isolated by the creature as a form of revenge. All the events and misfortunes encountered in Frankenstein have been linked to one another as a chain of actions and reactions. Of course the first action and link in the chain is started by Victor Frankenstein.
Because of Victor’s need for fame and desire for power leads to Victor becoming a monster. Victor begins his quest to bring life to a dead person because he does not want anyone to feel the pain of a loved ones death. At first he is not obsessed with his project. As he moves along in the project he thinks about what will happen to him. "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me." (Shelley 39) He realizes that he will become famous if he accomplishes the task of bringing a person back to life. The realization that he will become famous turns him into an obsessive monster. He wanted to be admired, and praised as a species creator. He isolates himself from his family and works on the creature. “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” (Shelley 156) By spending most of his time inside on his experiment, he has no time to write or contact his family. He puts fear within his family because they fear for him.
After Frankenstein discovered the source of human life, he became wholly absorbed in his experimental creation of a human being. Victor's unlimited ambition, his desire to succeed in his efforts to create life, led him to find devastation and misery. "...now that I have finished, the beauty of the dream had vanished..." (Shelley 51). Victor's ambition blinded him to see the real dangers of his project. This is because ambition is like a madness, which blinds one self to see the dangers of his actions. The monster after realizing what a horror he was demanded that victor create him a partner. "I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was like torture..." (Shelley 169). Victor's raw ambition, his search for glory, has left him. His eyes have been opened to see his horrible actions, and what have and could become of his creations. As a result, Victor has realized that he is creating a monster, which could lead to the downfall of mankind. His choice is simple, save his own life or save man.
Victor Frankenstein's upbringing in a perfect society ultimately led to the destruction of his life which coincided with the lives of those emotionally close to him. Victor was raised in an atmosphere where beauty and physical appearance define one's quality of life. This superficial way of life results in a lost sense of morals and selfishness, which in turn produces a lost sense of personal identity. This can cause a feeling of failure and resentment in the later stages of life which, in Victor's case, can be externalized into a form of hatred directed toward himself.
Victor Frankenstein, the monster’s creator, is the victim of his own pride. An ego unchecked is a dangerous thing. But in truth, it really just shows Victor’s humanity. He is privileged, educated, talented, loved, adored, but he is not perfect. His flaw is his own ego and pride. Without doubt, this is the result of a childhood where he was overindulged. Overindulged to the extent he was given a little girl “Elizabeth” as a “present”, whom he considered from childhood “mine only” (Shelley 21). Little wonder the twenty year old Victor would think he could create, control and command life. But Victor as with any indulged child did not take the time to learn much from his parents about parenting and fath...
In Frankenstein, Shelley creates two very complex characters. They embody the moral dilemmas that arise from the corruption and disturbance of the natural order of the world. When Victor Frankenstein is attending school, he becomes infatuated with creating a living being and starts stealing body parts from morgues around the university. After many months of hard work, he finishes one stormy night bringing his creation to life. However, “now that [Victor] had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart” (Chambers). Right after Victor realizes what he has done, he falls into deep depression and must be nursed back to health by his friend. Victor spends the rest of the story facing consequences and moral problems from creating unnatural life. When he realizes that the ‘monster’ has killed his brother, even though no one believes him, he feels responsible for his brother’s murder because he was responsible for the existence of the ‘monster’. Also feeling responsible, Victor...