Pursue Happiness; At Any Cost?

What is true happiness? It is the ultimate goal of every human beings life but how can it be obtained? It takes different things to make each individual happy. "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." This is a very famous quote by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. It is basically saying the only objective of life is attaining happiness. While some people are willing to do anything they want to achieve happiness, others are more considerate. They think about the overall effect their action will have on everyone. In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, she expresses her notions regarding the hazard of pursuing happiness through the procurement of knowledge, because true contentment is found in the emotional connections established between people. The pursuit of knowledge is not indispensably a malignant thing, but it can cause destruction when it is pursued beyond natural limits. Victor Frankenstein becomes a slave to his passion for learning in various ways; first his life is controlled by his obsession to engender life, and later he becomes a slave to the monster he has engendered.

Frankenstein describes the commencement of his life as a blissful time with his family. During his childhood, Frankenstein was ardent about learning, but his emotional link with Elizabeth kept him from consummately engrossing himself in his studies. When Frankenstein left home to study at the University of Ingolstadt, he became fixated on his quest to denude the mystery of life. He tells of working in the laboratory until sunrise and being nonchalant to the comeliness of the world around him. These vicissitudes in Frankenstein's way of life represent Shelley's notion that one's passions must be contro...

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...uences of his actions up to now. He decides to turn around on his voyage and culminate it there. He does this as he has learned, through what he optically discerned in Frankenstein, the hazards of knowledge.

Because of Frankenstein’s ambitions of achieving happiness through gaining knowledge, he created a monster and the consequences of creating it ever unimaginable. He lost every single person he was close to or loved and in the end lost his own life. He began realizing that it was the people he loved that mattered rather than his knowledge. After seeing Frankenstein die, Walton ultimately pulls back from his perfidious mission having learned from his example of what a hunger for knowledge can do. Mary Shelley does a great job showing the harmful effects of a thirst for knowledge are, and also presenting to us where our true happiness lies, with our loved ones.