Victor's Responsibility In Frankenstein

To begin, Victor betrays nature with the physical creation of the monster. Upon giving the creature life, Victor becomes horrified of what he had created and essentially left the creature in fear. It is nature’s responsibility to create life, not mankind. Since Victor gives the monster life, he has created something unnatural and he himself even admits his mistake when he states, “I have created a monster.” To make matters worse, Victor had left his creation on its own when the monster had no prior experience in the world and was learning everything from this point on. The monster, at this point, reflected the innocent nature of a child and needed to be taught properly about life. Victor’s

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

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

He was brought into the world with no one to give him knowledge, support, and guidance. He was completely deserted by his creator. When he tried to make friends, everyone either ran away from him or tried to kill him. Calridge states, “At the time of his first violent act, he is merely seeking fellowship with another human, and he assumes little William, the “beautiful child” so unlike himself, to be too young to have formed prejudices based on appearance. Enraged to the point of murder…” This statement shows how everything the creature feels or does stems back to Victor. If Victor had just accepted and loved his creature for what he was, then he wouldn’t have killed little William or any of Victor’s other loved ones. His rejection and misfortune was not caused by his actions, but rather his appearance, a physical trait that Victor had created and the creature could not change. The creature's problem was that he was “ugly” and “deformed”, but he did not choose to be physically deformed. Victor created him that way. Thus, Victor is ultimately responsible for the creature's rejection.

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

He always puts the blame on his passions or his wishes, never himself. He even blames his own father. According to Victor, his actions are the the fault of the “spirit of good” or chance or knowledge. When he does finally acknowledge that the creation of the creature and the way the creature grew up is his fault, he claims he’s only “not altogether free from blame”. He does not fully take the blame, and then he goes on to basically say that everybody makes mistakes, so it’s okay that he reanimated and abandoned a human who had already been dead. He calls his creation a catastrophe, a wretch, a miserable monster, a filthy demon, a devil, a depraved wretch. What Victor does not acknowledge is that he was the one who made the creature this way. When it comes to describing Victor, he is seen as “noble and godlike in ruin”. He is not seen as a monster who did irreparable damage to another human being, but as a fallen god. What’s more is that Victor does not hesitate to blame himself for the deaths of William, Henry, Elizabeth, and even Justine. Though he is, in a way, responsible for their deaths, it’s by extension. He won’t take the blame for what he’s truly responsible for-creating and abandoning this creature with nothing but fear, confusion, and

Victor thought “for this I had 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”(page). This quote demonstrates that once Victor had concluded his work of creating the monster, he realized that it may have been a huge mistake. He was not satisfied with his creation instead he was filled with terror. In result of his realization, he left the monster to fend for himself and suffer. Victor shows an evil side of himself by abandoning the monster and leaving him to be universally shunned by society. By Victor doing this one evil act, it causes the monster himself to go off and initiate evil acts of his own.

The enormous difference in the way Victor views the creature before and after its completion shows that he has an altered state of mind while he works on it. As a result of Victor’s secrecy about his creation, he sacrifices his health and happiness to make a creature that disgusts him.

The monster knows his master and knows that Victor wishes he hadn’t created him and this makes the monster feel terrible about himself. He also knows that Victor feels like he played a hand in every person that his creation murders and the Monster learns to use this to his advantage. He does what he know will hurt his master the most, be kills Victor's friends one by one. This twists Victor and sours his very being. It turns him into a completely different person and killing his creation becomes his goal in life. He went from an energetic and curious young scientists to a old, licentious man bent on killing. The monster felt that he was getting back at his master but probably didn’t fully understand what he was doing by killing. He never had anyone teach him how twisted and evil taking a life is and as a result it was relatively easy for him to nullify a human being. Society had shunning him because of his horrific appearance from the first time they saw him and never looked back. He stands at an intimidating eight feet and is crafted of mangled human corpses, not exactly a common looking being. While he might at looked strange or scary, he had the mind of a very young child what needed guidance. Because of Victor’s guilt, he never gave the monster the teaching that it really needed. This feeds into the cycle and really makes the problem that ends up killing several people and twisting Victor into someone no reasonable person would strive to

The thirst for knowledge caused both Victor and the creature issues. Victor became so obsessed with creating the creature that it drove him mad. He

Shelley explains how Victor has a great mental turmoil after he indirectly caused the death of people who were close to him by the actions he took to create the monster. Shelley’s description of Victor’s feelings show the deprivation of hope and fear in his soul and the emphasises the pain in which he was indirectly the cause of. Victor not only caused his own mental illness, but he also caused his own physical illness. Victor makes himself physically sick by his actions during the creation of his monster. Victor’s work unintentionally causes himself to decline in health and become vulnerable to illnesses. “When Victor is working on his experiment, he cannot love: he ignores his family, even his fiance Elizabeth, and takes no pleasure in the beauties of nature. Moreover, he becomes physically… ill, subject to nervous fevers”(Weiner 83). Victor is shown to focus directly on his work, causing him to forget most of the outside world and not be influenced by forces that usually comfort and heal him. His work makes Victor subject to nervous fevers, causing himself to become sick more often and need help from family and friends more often. Although the process of creating the monster was physically taxing on Victor, the end product caused him even more pain. The creation of the creature impaired

The monster believed that Victor would accept him, but after he realized that not only did Victor not want to assume his position in the monster’s life, but society also rejected him, it became a transitory thought, and instead became replaced with his bloodthirst towards Victor and his loved ones, which he knew would hurt way worse than just killing him; making him lonely like himself. Both Victor and the monster partook in horrid acts, in which held horrendous actions; the main one being Victor creating the monster in the first place which in result caused the both of them heartbreak, loneliness, and pain. If Victor wouldn’t have created the monster, then his life would not be filled with so much grief and emptiness; Victor is the true monster, although they are both the primal protagonists as much as they are the antagonists because of the display of the emotions they both portray as lamenting humans/monsters, and the power they give to nature in order to destroy one another. Victor used nature to his advantage, although it was wrong; Victor used nature to create and destroy the monster; he used the

The creature is renounced by Victor throughout the book, which removes any positive role model that the creature might have had. The two encounters that Victor has with the creature when it is first created are evidence of his rejection. The first is when Victor finishes creating the creature. During the process of creation, Victor dedicates himself so greatly that he "pursued [his] undertaking with unremitting ardour" (32). He puts aside everything else in his life, and concentrates completely on his purpose, which is to bring a being to life that would serve him. In order to do so, he spent an entire summer "engaged, heart and soul, in one pursuit" (32). Because of the hard work that Victor puts into his work of creation, he never really examines the fruits of his labour. He is too caught up in his work, and has "lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit" (32) of finishing his work on making the creature. So in the process of his creation, Victor is never really aware of what he is creating because he is too focused on the actual act of creation. However, when Victor finally finishes the work of making the creature, and takes time to look at what he has done, he is horrified by his accomplishment. As the creation opens an eye, and

Victor’s creation was another character in this story that experienced alienation and isolation. The monster was subjected to alienation his entire life. Unlike his creator, the monster did not choose this life of segregation, he was born into it. It seemed as if from the very first moment that Victor had laid eyes upon his creation he was viewed as being an abomination, and condemned to a life of rejection. The first experience that the monster had in life was upon opening his eyes and seeing the look of terror in his creator’s eyes. After Victor had abandoned his creation the creature is left with only questions and no one to answer them.