Frankenstein: Less Human Than His Creation Essays

“All was the work of my thrice-accursed hands! Ye weep, unhappy ones; but these are not your last tears! Again you shall raise the funeral wail.....he who would spend each vital drop of blood for your sakes – who has no thought nor sense of joy, except as it is mirrored also in your dear countenances… and spend his life serving you…. and if the destruction pause before the peace of the grave have succeeded to your sad torments. Thus spoke my prophetic soul…the first hapless victims to my unhallowed arts” (90). As stated earlier Victor switches from taking responsibility for the tragedies and renouncing them, in this passage Victor first truly laments the effects of his unhallowed arts. The theme of Victor’s guilt as the cause of his misery and wretchedness is repeated, in the passage with the image of the thrice accursed hands, and throughout the novel. Furthermore, the passage utilizes foreshadowing with the image of more tears to come and funeral wails. The foreshadowing though a powerful technique in creating suspense for the first time reader has a subtler meaning; Victor in his own narration recounting the tale incorrectly foreshadows his own end, the assumption that causes the deaths of more of his loved one. This false foreshadowing suggests guilt by the narration itself. To further this intimated guilt, Victor speaks of his only happiness coming from the happiness of his loved ones yet he shunned them

While attempting to uncover the meaning of life and death, and though he believed his experiments would further the paths of science, Victor fails to see the potential consequences of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (Shelley 37). This, in turn, creates a monster. After his “great” experiment, Victor spends his life in grief. Despite this, he manages to belittle his creation, and act superior to him, claiming that “I [Victor] will not hear you. There can be no community between you [the creature] and me; we are enemies” (Shelley 84). Even later on, when assured by the creature himself that Victor would be left alone if he creates a female counterpart, Victor cannot see past the shreds of pride he has left and refuses, causing the death of his family and loved ones. It’s Victor’s pride and his fear of the creature that clouds his judgement and in the end leads to his

In the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, the relationship of external apperence and internal feelings are directly related. The creature is created and he is innocent, though he is seaverly deformed. His nature is to be good and kind, but society only views his external appereance which is grotesque. Human nature is to judge by external apperence. He is automatically ostracized and labeled as a monster because of his external apperence. He finnaly realized that no matter how elequintly he speaks and how kind he is, people will never be able to see past his external deformities. Children are fearful of him, Adults think he is dangerous, and his own creator abandons him in disgust.

Due to Victor’s unwillingness to accept him, the creature was unable to conform to societal norms. From the creature’s very first moments, he is feared by others - the instant his eyes open, his creator cries out in terror and runs to his quarters. If only Victor had stayed and attempted to nurture his creation, instead of having “turned from [him] in disgust” (93), the creature may have enjoyed a gentle, upbringing in which he

There are evident similarities between Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Both Frankenstein and his creation share a love for nature, a longing for knowledge, and a desire for companionship.

Victor is foolish, as he dedicated half of his life working to create the being, and the second half trying to destroy it. The creature causes Victor’s death, although it was not by the creature’s own hands. The creature drives him to desperation, and it is the creature’s fault that he has nothing and no one to live for in the world. Near the end of his life, Victor gives Walton some final words of advice saying, “Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries" (162). Victor realizes his life has been ruined because of his scientific ambition, and he also acknowledges that the sins of his past will continue to haunt him. In the end, the creature causes Victor’s death just as the creature killed his family and friends; therefore, Victor neglects his health and travels to harsh environments to catch the monster ending in his own demise.

As a romantic novel Victor is responsible, because he abandoned his creation. As an archetype novel, Victor is the villain, because he was trying to play god. Finally,

Victor obsession with his creation represents the dark side of ambition. By creating the monster, “darkness” follow him wherever he goes through the representation of deaths and daunting weather like lightning. After his release from prison, he saw around him “nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me” (Shelley 160). By trying to turn himself into a god through the creation of the monster, that is, the unnatural, Victor is deprived of joy and is tormented by fevers, anxiety, and stress because he had thrown nature into the state of imbalance. Rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment through his scientific achievement, he lives in fear and guilt knowing that he is the cause for the destruction of his

As the novel goes on everyone Victor once cared for are decimated in the path of his creation. "I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him and desired and ardently prayed that I might have him within my grasp to wreak a great and signal revenge on his cursed head" (Shelley 103). Now, due to his unwavering lust for knowledge, all that was once good and innocent has been stripped from him. This has left him as a former shell of himself, to be compared with his own creation, solely driven by vengeance.

Victor and the Monster are both isolated from society. Both were abandoned early by a

Victor’s blindness to what his end result will produce is immediately revealed when his final work is a hideous creature. Victor, through repulsion, neglects caring for the creature in its blank slate, gradually fuelling the ambition it feels for revenge. With the monster isolated, he begins to learn, “I learned to distinguish between the operations

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, illustrates an interesting story focusing in on many different themes, but what most readers may miss, is the similarities between Victor Frankenstein and the creature he created. As the story develops, one may pick up on these similarities more and more. This is portrayed through their feelings of isolation, thirst for revenge, their bold attempt to play god, and also their hunger to obtain knowledge. These are all displayed through a series of both the actions and the words of Frankenstein and his creature.

The Creature was not an ordinary person, matter of fact he was not actually a person at all. He was a creature derived from the parts of deceased humans found in the graves of a cemetery. He didn’t look like a normal person. He was gigantic, hideous and certainly did not fit into society. He was shunned, yelled at, shot at, and caused fear to many just because of his appearance. The Creature wanted nothing more than to be able to fit in and feel the love and happiness that everyone else felt. His hope to finally obtain what he yearns for so immensely was so strong until one day things took a turn. The Creature states, “I cherished hope, it is true; but it vanished, when I beheld my person reflected in the water, or my shadow in the moon-shine” (Grimly 103). In other words, the Creature’s hopes were high of finding a companion and living a happy life until he saw his reflection and saw how hideous and unlike everyone else he was. He finally realized how set aside he was from everyone else and that his chances of finding happiness in someone else were very slim. Because the sole reason for his unhappiness is his appearance and since he cannot control his looks I feel he cannot be held accountable for his own happiness. The only one to blame is Frankenstein because he made him look the way he does, and created the monster everyone sees him as.

Some people see Frankenstein and his creature as complete opposites, but they are not as different as they may seem. Victor and his creature have no mother figure in the novel. Victor’s mother was there for Victor in the beginning but “resigned cheerfully to death… she died calmly” (Shelley 53), whereas the creature was born without one. Therefore, throughout the novel, both Victor and the creature have to depend on their fathers for guidance. Frankenstein and the creature are both intelligent. Frankenstein gains his intelligence through his schooling and experience, while the creature gains intelligence through observations, experience, and “Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter” (Shelley 155). These characters want to be accepted in the world. Frankenstein wants to be accepted in the

Dictionary of Narratology). Because if we identify the character of Victor start from his happy childhood, university environment, but since he created the human-like, the complexity of his life getting worse and worse. He tried to struggle and beated down the monster to reconcile his mistake, and went back to his hometown to safe his family but ironically he couldn’t.