Place. Home. Where we should go with our life. These are things that we constantly ask ourselves in life. But the truth is, we do not know. How can we tell what we are supposed to do? Out of all the things you look at, read, and talk about, only about eighty percent of the information coming to you is from your eyesight alone. Think of something someone just told you verbally. You’re only remembering about ten percent, now if there was a picture or object along with what you were told, you would have remembered sixty-five percent. That in itself should show just how important your eyes are to us. In the book Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, the main character Victor Frankenstein and the Monster are constantly using their eyes throughout the story, and fight for a ‘belonging’ in the world as well. Our place in the world is something that many scholars and people discuss. We want to know what our purpose is. A lot of the time, people spend their time looking for something to motivate them and show them the right path for their life. Our brains remember sixty five of what we see. Because of this, people base many of their opinions and thoughts on things we see. Our place is a complex thing. And we go about finding our place, …show more content…
And Victor becomes obsessed with making someone come back to life. It is especially common for people to question their place when they lose a loved one. Victor making ‘life’ as it were, is probably a way for him to cope with the loss of his mother. He spends forever doing research, finding bones and muscle tissues. And then, he finally has enough to make his ‘person’. After the process of making the Monster, Victor looks at it and is horrified by its dreadful appearance. His eyes are a dull yellow and paralyzed Victor with fear. He wants to destroy the creature but is not sure how and instead flees his apartment. The Monster departs from the apartment before Victor returns and wanders around
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
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
The creature's physical grotesqueness makes the creature unable to attain affection from the human societies. The creature is initially rejected by his creator, who is the closest resemblance to a mother or father figure. Despite this relationship, Victor finds the creature to be a "miserable monster" (39). Consequently, as soon as life is present within the creature, Victor abandons his child. Victor claims that he "escaped, and rushed down the stairs" (40) away from the
His friend from home comes to surprise Victor but he ends up consoling him for months — he does not want to confront the horrors he has single handedly created. He is such a disaster that he cannot write his family, only putting them under more stress. Finally, after months go by Victor begins to regain his mind and consciousness. He receives a letter from his father stating that his child brother was murdered. This, of all things, is what finally pushes Victor to return home to his family. Once Victor has returned to his family he realizes what exactly he had done. Victor’s creation had made its way to his family’s home and had taken the life of his brother. Not only is has the life of this young child been stripped away but Justine, a family friend, has been accused of killing the poor boy. Justine had never done anything but love and care for the child as if he were her own. He claims Justine’s innocence but he does not come clean— he cannot. If Victor were to mention that of a monster he would be institutionalized and Justine would still be found guilty. Justine is put to death, the second being stripped of life at the his monster. Victor feels “a weight of despair pressed on [his] heart,” (Shelley 111). These murders are the fault of Frankenstein and the weight he feels is overwhelming guilt. Without the construction of a new life, of a monster, these lives would not be lost… still he manages to fond great comfort in
Victor has become obsessed with studying (something no one should ever be interested in) and has locked himself in his room studying for days on end. He "applied so closely, it may be easily conceived that my progress was rapid. My ardour was indeed the astonishment of the students, and my proficiency that of the masters... Two years passed in this manner, during which I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make". (7) This early application of himself is what drove him to become lonely and reclusive, shying away from all who attempted to come into contact with him. He is also inspired in this chapter to start his reanimation project. He becomes consumed in this one project spending many months alone in the top of his apartment assembling his creature. He raided slaughter houses, grave yards, and dissection rooms to furnish what he needed to create his monster. The lines between life and death became blurred
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
Before Victor goes off to college, his mother dies which leaves him distraught. Subsequently he became infatuated with death and the idea of bringing life back. He said, "To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death" ( Shelley Chtr 4). Slowly, he became a monster engulfed in his own subconscious with the help of his studies in science.
To do so, he closed himself off and dove into his research for many months. Because of this, he was blinded by his Id and the possibility of if he could create this instead of if he should. When Victor finally created the Monster, stating that “His [the Monster’s] limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!” (Shelley 59). Victor had dreams of creating the perfect human, and goes into more detail about his charming physic. However, when the Monster finally comes to life, Victor runs away screaming to the courtyard “[...] which had been [his] asylum” (Shelley 61). Victor becomes so enwrapped with the possibility of reversing death that he unintentionally creates an abomination. Leaving the Monster behind was another example of living his Id. The creature now has the freedom to do as he pleases, like the eventual killing of Victor’s brother. These, along with many others, are the Id behavior that Victor shows through his
It is Victor's story that truly exposes the true theme of the story, with him speaking of his days as a child and his first friendship with the girl his parents adopted. He lives a fine life, full of joy and happiness with friend plentiful. When he goes to college he is without friends, but soon befriends one of the professors and engaged in lengthy conversations with him. This isn't the same friendship as before, lacking the real love and companionship of his family, and he soon begins work on his creation. He so overwhelmed by the idea of creating a perfect person he is blinded from the deformity of the creature. When the creature is finished he examines his work and is mortified by it, running and hiding he escapes the creature that soon wanders away. Soon after Victor becomes sick and deathly, he shuns society and people and is almost dead when his friend Clerval arrives at the college. Clerval nurses Victor back to health, but Victor isn't physically sick, he has just
Victor, after being convinced to create a female companion for the monster, realizes that this will only create double the amount of destruction, he then makes the choice to discontinue his project to prevent more devastation. Instead of less damage resulting from this choice it only brings more harm to his life and everyone around him. First, his good friend Henry Clerval is murdered by the beast and Victor is accused of this murder, “The human frame could no longer support the agonies that I endured, and I was carried out of the room in strong convulsions.” (Shelley 129). This was Victor’s reaction upon seeing Henry’s corpse and demonstrates how deeply his pursuit for knowledge affects him. Even though he is later released on circumstantial evidence, he will be scarred for life knowing that he responsible for yet another death. Given that Victor destroyed the monster’s only hope of having someone else like him in the world; the monster swears revenge and that he will return on Victor’s wedding night. Victor misinterpreted this warning and instead of the monster attacking Victor, his creation attacked and
During Frankenstein Victor’s mental state was altered after witnessing the power of nature firsthand when he saw lightning destroy a tree near his home in Geneva.This observation leads him to study philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt where he became obsessed with anatomy. Victor takes God’s power into his own hands, “When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it.” (Shelly 32) He has the gruesome idea to create his own human from the remains of the dead. Victor sneaks into charnel-houses, digs into graves to collect limbs, disturbing the resting corpses, and studies uses them to find the answer how to make life come from death. During the process of creating his monster, Victor
While Frankenstein was creating what he would imagine to be a beautiful creation, turned out to be something that began to haunt him. As Frankenstein went out and about finding and studying the anatomy of the human body, he would go to charnel houses to collect bones, as well as butcher houses to get all the organs he needs. Amongst all the corpses that he went through he, explains that he found the best of what there was, the most beautiful parts that he could find. Once he got all the body parts assembled, he brought the monster to life only to be horrified by the end result of what is supposed to be a human but it’s clear yellow skin and big yellow eyes and black lips, make the creature look terrifying.
The monster 's appearance causes his creator to abandon him and prevents him from normal human interaction. He is forced to learn about the world on his own and spends most of his time watching others. Frankenstein is not the only one negatively affected by his existence. In the process of bringing the monster to life, Victor had deprived himself of rest and health, causing him to fall ill for several months. Shortly after his recovery, Victor learns his younger brother has been murdered. Frankenstein has killed his creator’s brother and framed an innocent girl to get back at Victor for abandoning him. After the girl is executed, Victor becomes consumed with guilt knowing he is responsible for two of his family members deaths. The monster does not stop there, he goes on to kill Victor’s friend Henry and fiance, Elizabeth. Because of his creation, Victor is haunted by depression and guilt for most of his life and died a lonely death hunting Frankenstein.
Once you are dead you have ended, there is no more. By creating new life, and in essence, playing God, Victor upsets the balance in the world which becomes a major hazard later on. The monster, who is created from various men or “raw materials” as Victor calls them, to soothe his conscience, is ghastly to look at due to the stitches and scars that cover his body. Who wouldn’t be afraid of something so hideous, “his yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (56), standing above all humans, a towering 8 feet tall, and his strength is enormous, able to crush bones in seconds. The monster appears to learn quickly, able to master the art of speech over a few months, where it takes humans years to learn how to talk in full and complete sentences. Almost all of his attributes are increased to “super human” level, strength beyond normal, his height, his intelligence, and his capacity for emotion. He can love, he can hate, he can fear, and they are all taken to an extreme level. He falls in love, on a non romantic level, with Safie and Felix, wanting the best for them and caring for them, showing a very protective side, finding great joy in bringing happiness to “his” family. After being run from the hovel the monster lives in the forest, his body better equipped to the harsh conditions and bitter temperatures, allowing him to live in the Arctic desert where Victor ultimately tracks him. Though the monster needs
We’re collectively on this planet, and the course it’s headed on isn’t sustainable . Looking up, many people still think the sky is the limit and what exists after it would be the heavens. Others want concrete proof and aren’t satisfied information. We all have distinctive means of interpretation, but the universal one we can’t neglect is our sense of sight. The quote ‘’seeing is believing’’ holds strong because while we’re all different we’re constructed the same.