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Frankenstein and human nature
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Recommended: Frankenstein and human nature
Do you ever feel that you're at the top of the world to the point that you feel like your immortality will trump anything that gets in your way? “Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.” (Og Mandino). Fortunately, this quote from Og Mandino reveals the egotistical traits’ of Macbeth hails him the Thane of Cawdor, and Victor who controls life by re-animating the deceased. To put things briefly, Victor Frankenstein and Macbeth’s ambition fuels their hunger for more power which creates negative consequences through the development of these two characters.
To begin with, Frankenstein was most certainly blinded by his ambition throughout his life in Marie Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. Victor is trying to defy
In the stories Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, there are characters that have similarities, and also share some differences. In the book Frankenstein, the character I chose is the monster, and the character I chose from the book A Midsummer Night’s Dream is Oberon. I chose these individuals because they are both out for revenge, they both are cruel, but they also differ. Their differences are that Oberon has a wife, but the monster does not. The monster was created by Victor Frankenstein, but Oberon was born.
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.
As a tragic hero, Victor’s tragedies begin with his overly obsessive thirst for knowledge. Throughout his life, Victor has always been looking for new things to learn in the areas of science and philosophy. He goes so far with his knowledge that he ends up creating a living creature. Victor has extremely high expectations for his creation but is highly disappointed with the outcome. He says, “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” (Shelley 35). Frankenstein neglects the creature because of his horrifying looks, which spark the beginning of numerous conflicts and tragedies. At this point, the creature becomes a monster because of Victor’s neglect and irresponsibility. The monster is forced to learn to survive on his own, without anyone or anything to guide him along the way. Plus, the monster’s ugly looks cause society to turn against him, ad...
Although some critics say that the monster Victor has created is to blame for the destruction and violence that follow the experiment, it is Victor who is the responsible party. First, Victor, being the scientist, should have known how to do research on the subject a lot more than he had done. He obviously has not thought of the consequences that may result from it such as the monster going crazy, how the monster reacts to people and things, and especially the time it will take him to turn the monster into the perfect normal human being. This is obviously something that would take a really long time and a lot of patience which Victor lacks. All Victor really wants is to be the first to bring life to a dead person and therefore be famous. The greed got to his head and that is all he could think about, while isolating himself from his friends and family. In the play of Frankenstein, when Victor comes home and sets up his lab in the house, he is very paranoid about people coming in there and finding out what he is doing. At the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Victor says:
All the events and misfortunes encountered in Frankenstein have been linked to one another as a chain of actions and reactions. Of course, the first action and link in the chain is started by Victor Frankenstein. Victor’s life starts with great potential. He comes from a decently wealthy family whose lack of love towards each other never existed. He is given everything he needs for a great future, and his academics seem to be convalescing.
After Frankenstein discovered the source of human life, he became wholly absorbed in his experimental creation of a human being. Victor's unlimited ambition, his desire to succeed in his efforts to create life, led him to find devastation and misery. "...now that I have finished, the beauty of the dream had vanished..." (Shelley 51). Victor's ambition blinded him to see the real dangers of his project. This is because ambition is like a madness, which blinds one self to see the dangers of his actions. The monster after realizing what a horror he was demanded that victor create him a partner. "I now also began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation, and this was like torture..." (Shelley 169). Victor's raw ambition, his search for glory, has left him. His eyes have been opened to see his horrible actions, and what have and could become of his creations. As a result, Victor has realized that he is creating a monster, which could lead to the downfall of mankind. His choice is simple, save his own life or save man.
He toils endlessly in alchemy, spending years alone, tinkering. However, once the Creature is brought to life, Frankenstein is no longer proud of his creation. In fact, he’s appalled by what he’s made and as a result, Frankenstein lives in a perpetual state of unease as the Creature kills those that he loves and terrorizes him. Victor has realized the consequences of playing god. There is irony in Frankenstein’s development, as realized in Victor’s desire to destroy his creation. Frankenstein had spent so much effort to be above human, but his efforts caused him immediate regret and a lifetime of suffering. Victor, if he had known the consequences of what he’s done, would have likely not been driven by his desire to become better than
death is near. He tries not to show now that he is scared. "If this
Victor Frankenstein's upbringing in a perfect society ultimately led to the destruction of his life which coincided with the lives of those emotionally close to him. Victor was raised in an atmosphere where beauty and physical appearance define one's quality of life. This superficial way of life results in a lost sense of morals and selfishness, which in turn produces a lost sense of personal identity. This can cause a feeling of failure and resentment in the later stages of life which, in Victor's case, can be externalized into a form of hatred directed toward himself.
In Frankenstein, Shelley creates two very complex characters. They embody the moral dilemmas that arise from the corruption and disturbance of the natural order of the world. When Victor Frankenstein is attending school, he becomes infatuated with creating a living being and starts stealing body parts from morgues around the university. After many months of hard work, he finishes one stormy night bringing his creation to life. However, “now that [Victor] had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart” (Chambers). Right after Victor realizes what he has done, he falls into deep depression and must be nursed back to health by his friend. Victor spends the rest of the story facing consequences and moral problems from creating unnatural life. When he realizes that the ‘monster’ has killed his brother, even though no one believes him, he feels responsible for his brother’s murder because he was responsible for the existence of the ‘monster’. Also feeling responsible, Victor...
He turns away the peace given to him by nature just to satisfy his desire for revenge, and becomes a broken being. Mary Shelley demonstrates in Frankenstein what happens if someone strays too far from nature. Shelley purposely shows the destructive nature of science in her novel, highlighting the strife that her society is going through. Her society, disillusioned by war and the devastation that new technologies caused, wanted to go back to their roots in nature, and her novel pushes at that idea. Shelley’s example of Victor’s and the Creature’s downfall warns us of the dangers and temptations of science.
As he dove deeper into studying life and death and created the monster, the darkness the knowledge produced consumed him. All of his energy was directed towards his quests, to the point where he “seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for [that] one pursuit”, consequently placing him in an abnormal place mentally, emotionally, and even physically (line 30-31). Although Victor describing his creation process as something he was wholly devoted to can arguably be justified due to the common believe that full dedication to one’s craft is needed to be productive, Frankenstein looks back on his devotion with trembling lips, showing even his recognition of the negative impact the dangerous studies had on him. Frankenstein’s inclusion of his feelings of regret and fear in the retelling of his experience show his awareness of the transformation he endured due to the knowledge. The acquisition of the dangerous knowledge created a deep infatuation in Frankenstein, causing him to neglect his family, his friends, and even himself until his work was
In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is consistently reckless and does not care about the consequences, who he hurts or if what he is doing is wrong. Victor is so ambitious about resurrecting a body he does not think about any consequences. When Elizabeth and Henry visit Victor, Victor denies them and tells them he has to work on his experiments. Elizabeth and Henry are hurt that Victor is choosing science above going out with them. This encounter shows us that Victor's ambitions are his number one priority in life, and he will focus on them before anything else. When Victor and Fritz first start up the machine, Fritz shuts everything down because he realizes that what they are doing is wrong.
He created a life, and then spontaneously he quickly decided to run away from his creation. Victor’s actions after creating what he created were really irresponsible, and did not correctly took care of the circumstance’s he put himself in. The creation was never actually evil, but he felt abandoned by what could had been called his father. Frankenstein, the monster, was only a seeker for companionship. He strongly desired to feel loved, rather than abandoned. Society’s evil behavior toward the monster is what altered the monster’s conduct and followed to how he acted.
In the beginning of the novel Victor learns about the death and anatomy of humans and tries to create and bring someone to life. After a lot of work he successfully created Frankenstein, he saw a horrific sight, “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a luscious black and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (55). At this moment Victor knew there was something wrong and that he had messed up, “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (55). This part allows the reader to know Frankenstein is not human and he has supernatural