Natalie A. Luna, Mr. Chomin English 10 3-20-24. The Role of Responsibility in Frankenstein Responsibility is a chapter in life that many people are not ready to approach. It's tragic how badly mistakes can impact a person's life, but often it is a good lesson learned. Mary Shelley proves this in her novel Frankenstein. Written about a smart scientist who goes above and beyond with his scientific discoveries and creates a supernatural being. The story is told of a gifted scientist, the main character who succeeds in giving life to a being of his creation. But he fails to be a father figure. The novel expresses a lack of responsibility. This book shows the main character's pursuit of knowledge and his discovery. The main character starts off …show more content…
He had siblings and parents. A rich family.Most of all a healthy family. Yet he still felt he needed to fill a void. Victor states, “A new species would bless me as its creator and its source.” (Shelley 55). Selfishness takes over the main character's consciousness. When he brings the creature to life, he is scared to see reality and mess up his life, so he leaves the creature alone to fend for himself. Life comes with choice, and it's up to you to choose what you do with that opportunity. The creature then states “I remembered Adam's supplication to his Creator. But where is mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him." Shelley 94. That quote shows how scared the main character was, so he ran out and abandoned his creature. He couldn't believe what he had done, and he didn't want to be held responsible for what he had just done. That is also another way to show that people base opinions solely on looks rather than personality. While we look at this novel, we can see that the main character's absence at any given moment in the creature's life affects those surrounded. The creature only wanted love because he was denied affection and love from the very moment he had a beating heart in his chest. The creature became so angry that the main character
Taking responsibility is “the state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one's power, control, or management” (dictionary.com). When you decide to take the responsibility of something or someone then do it to your greatest ability and do not leave any stones unturned. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley determines the role of responsibility for the welfare, acts, the deaths and the lives of others. Taking responsibility means being accountable for your actions, accepting the mistakes and taking the ownership of the mistakes that come along with one’s actions. Taking responsibility does not mean that all the actions will go as planned but accepting the consequences even if they do not go
Although humans have the tendency to set idealistic goals to better future generations, often the results can prove disastrous, even deadly. The tale of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, focuses on the outcome of one man's idealistic motives and desires of dabbling with nature, which result in the creation of horrific creature. Victor Frankenstein was not doomed to failure from his initial desire to overstep the natural bounds of human knowledge. Rather, it was his poor parenting of his progeny that lead to his creation's thirst for the vindication of his unjust life. In his idealism, Victor is blinded, and so the creation accuses him for delivering him into a world where he could not ever be entirely received by the people who inhabit it. Not only failing to foresee his faulty idealism, nearing the end of the tale, he embarks upon a final journey, consciously choosing to pursue his creation in vengeance, while admitting he himself that it may result in his own doom. The creation of an unloved being and the quest for the elixir of life holds Victor Frankenstein more accountable for his own death than the creation himself.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a complex novel that was written during the age of Romanticism. It contains many typical themes of a common Romantic novel, such as dark laboratories, the moon and a monster; however, Frankenstein is anything but a common novel. Many lessons are embedded into this novel, including how society acts towards anything different. The monster fell victim to the system commonly used by society to characterize a person by only his or her outer appearance.
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is more than just a regular novel. It is a book that conveys a deep philosophical message. The novel moved me to my very soul. It turned out to be a book not about an encounter against a monster but a misfortune of a scientist, who reached the goal of his work and life and realized that breathless horror and disgust filled his heart but all of these is on the surface. The inmost philosophical thought is covered and hidden, but is very profound. The author tries to say that life is a gift. After this gift is given no one can take it away and it transforms the accountability of the creator. The novel makes the reader anxious with the question: “Is a human being able to take obligation to provide life?”
Frankenstein is an examination of scientific success, but also brings up the question. parental responsibilities, and how important nature and nurture is. bringing up a child in the family. What Shelley asks are the consequences of taking a god like role? To answer this, we must examine Frankenstein.
Social and Individual Responsibility in Frankenstein Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in a time of wonder. The main wonder was whether you could put life back into the dead. Close to the topic of bringing life back into the dead was whether you could create your own being, like selective breeding, but a bit more powerful. Close to where Mary lived, there was a man named Vultair who was experimenting with putting electricity through frogs to see if they could come back to life. With that going on close to her, as well as the fear of a revolution and the pressure on her to think of a ghost story, it is not surprising she thought of a horror story that would still be popular in the 21st Century.
In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein a central question is raised: How does a creator take responsibility towards the life they create? The question is based on Victor Frankenstein's treatment of his creation throughout the work. However, Shelley does not offer answers as to how one cares for a life. Shelley’s novel solely suggests what not to do when caring for a lifeform. Mary Shelley’s treatment of the question through Victor affects the reader’s understanding of the work by allowing the readers to know Victor’s thoughts and actions towards his creation and elicit feelings of sympathy regarding the creature based on the creature’s story.
To say that people want to be loved is an understatement. Humans crave and thrive off the feeling of being somebody’s everything. How can one survive if they are feeling completely and utterly alone? Simple answer, they can’t. From the moment an infant is born the desire to receive attention is instilled in their minds. Growing up without a role model to look up to who also provides wisdom and discipline can leave someone damaged and broken, seeking affection. Outcomes from abandonment issues vary from attachment to low self-esteem and anxiety. Throughout the novel the Creature has been on an emotional roller coaster experiencing a world wind of thoughts and feelings. Victor’s actions wounded the Creature resulting in no one to nurture him.
Victor Frankenstein assumes the sole responsibility for the deaths of his friends and family due to his inability to learn from nature and past experiences in terms of his creation. Victor disregards the teachings of nature and constructs a monster capable of destruction, he ignores his preceding experiences with self-education and aggravates the monster to kill, and fails to protect his loved ones by his incapacity to deduce the creature’s objectives from it’s prior activities.
The novel Frankenstein written by Mary Shelley is a work of fiction that breaks the ethics of science. Ethics is defined as rules of conduct or moral principles which are ignored in the story. The story is about a person named Victor Frankenstein who creates an artificial being. Victor abandons the being out of fear and the being is left to discover the outside world on his own and be rejected by people making the monster go on a violent rampage. Victor’s decision would affect him later on by the monster killing his loved ones causing Victor to suffer. Then Victor chooses to seek revenge on the monster and this choice will bring him to his death. In novel Frankenstein one might say that the main character, Victor, breaks the ethics of science when he plays God by creating his own being.
Mary Shelley expresses various ethical issues by creating a mythical monster called Frankenstein. There is some controversy on how Mary Shelley defines human nature in the novel, there are many features of the way humans react in situations. Shelley uses a relationship between morality and science, she brings the two subjects together when writing Frankenstein, and she shows the amount of controversy with the advancement of science. There are said to be some limits to the scientific inquiry that could have restrained the quantity of scientific implications that Mary Shelley was able to make, along with the types of scientific restraints. Mary Shelley wrote this classic novel in such a way that it depicted some amounts foreshadowing of the world today. This paper will concentrate on the definition of human nature, the controversy of morality and science, the limits to scientific inquiry and how this novel ties in with today’s world.
The novel Frankenstein demonstrates a connection between taking personal responsibility and the snowball effect. Certain circumstances throughout the novel where responsibility is not taking results in a situation in which something good or bad increased at an exponential rate. An example of this from the story would be when Victor Frankenstein did not take responsibility for the monster and the monster began to unintentionally scare and kill people. If Victor were to take responsibility from the beginning, the majority of the monsters actions could have been avoided, therefore avoiding situations from increasing exponentially. Those who took responsibility were also affected, both physically and mentally. The novel Frankenstein shows a connection
Taking responsibility for one's actions is a hallmark of maturity, leadership, and capability. When one can admit their faults or wrongdoings when they happen, life usually moves along much smoother. Consequences for those who attempt to shift blame off themselves for their own misdeeds tend to be much more severe than those who acknowledge them as their own. In literature, agency is the ability of a character to act on their environment, those who act positively and take responsibility for their actions would be said to have good agency. The absence of this quality can result in large consequences for not only the person lacking in agency, but those around them as well. Victor Frankenstein and Rodion Raskolnikov’s delusions of grandeur, unwillingness
What are ethics? Ethics are the moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity, otherwise known as the branch that deals with moral principles. The book Frankenstein is relevant within today's ethics by the advancement of medical science. As cited from the book, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, there are four main principles of medical ethics, which are,”Respect for Autonomy, Beneficence, and Nonmaleficence and Justice”. These three of these principles are tested in Frankenstein in the way Victor obtains his materials for the creation of his monster, along with Victor not having the best interest for the creation of his monster, and lastly, no consideration good or bad that could come from this creation.
Mary Shelley in her book Frankenstein addresses numerous themes relevant to the current trends in society during that period. However, the novel has received criticism from numerous authors. This paper discusses Walter Scott’s critical analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in his Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Review of Frankenstein (1818).