Victor Frankenstein Critical Analysis

Life is precious and death is inescapable. Love is the only thing that holds our words together, because without it, life is dull and meaningless, and actually not so different from death. To try and conquer the very thing that takes away life would require a great and powerful amount of love, and yet in Frankenstein, the very opposite was directed towards the same purpose. Victor Frankenstein successfully created a living being that was derived from death itself, but he doomed his scientific discovery from the onset of it’s creation by his lack of scientific morality, the power that naming holds, and his subconscious decision to purposely make his discovery hideous and unlovable, so that it could not be considered a being that belonged to

What he found through studying both human anatomy and the decay of life could not be unlearned, and so it should have been restrained until it could have been understood to a better degree both by himself and his fellow colleagues. Instead he strived forward, keeping his discovery to himself and ignoring the clear warning signs of a possibly volatile experiment. He considers the lack of current scientific discovery due to the fear of the unknown, and not because of the morality of the situation: “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries” (Shelley 37). Victor does not wait to consider what might happen if his experiment fails, in which case all of his work in the field of study up until the point would be rendered meaningless. would mean that all of the work of his adult life would have been rendered meaningless. However, if his experiment would have succeeded, as it unfortunately did, Victor never even considered the boundaries that would have been broken, both scientifically, socially, and religiously. His successful creation of life from death would have destroyed any thought that God created and watched over all life, for Victor’s creation would not be of God but of man, and such a realization would have sent many religious communities into upheaval at the very thought, let alone if they viewed the specimen itself. The scientific community would have been thrown into chaos at this discovery, both breaking the bonds of all current knowledge and by creating a path of future scientific breakthroughs