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Frankenstein and moral dilemmas
Frankenstein and moral dilemmas
Frankenstein and moral dilemmas
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Humans are naturally curious, but in Frankenstein that curiosity leads to unfortunate events happening. These events show that unchecked curiosity leads to tragedy and troublemaking. Everything terrible that happened to Victor was due too his curiosity. He was curious about creating life, the monster's threat; the monster was curious about humanity. Victor is so enamored at the idea of creating life. He spends months studying at Ingolstadt and then in isolation working on his own creation, the monster. "After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were …show more content…
This curiosity leads to Victor playing God and creating life. "But Pandora was very curious about what was in the box. She begged Epimetheus to let her open it, but he always said no. Finally one day he fell asleep, and she stole the key (or broke the seal) and opened the box (or vase)" (Pandora's Box). Pandora and Victor can be compared in the sense that both could not contain their curiosity. Once both of them let loose their monster, evil was released into the world. The monster then leaves victor and proceeds to ruin his life. What more could he have accomplished, had he not created the monster (Rhetorical Question)? A mind as brilliant as Victors could have been destined to discover so much more (Ethos). "It feeds a pattern of emotional highs and lows that keeps us hooked (Curiosity: The Good, the Bad, and the Useless). The reason Victor pursued creating the monster was because it provided color to his life at Ingolstadt. Perhaps he was traumatized by the death of his mother, and wanted the means to bring her back. Although, had Victor not been curious in tempting the fates, his life
At first, Victor believes himself superior to nature, and he builds a creature to prove his dominance. After gathering the information and materials needed to create life, Victor begins to fantasize about what he is about to do. He sees “life and death [as] ideal bounds, which [he] should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into [their] dark world. A new species would bless [him] as its creator and source, many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to [him]” (Shelley 55). Life and death are natural things, but Victor thinks that he can “break through” them and create life. He alone would be the person to “pour a torrent of light into their dark world,” as if he was God, ruling over all of the world. This shows Victor’s lack of respect towards life and how he intends to overcome the boundaries set by nature. Unlike the Romantic who revered and honored nature, Victor wants to use it for his own gain. He expects “happy” and “excellent natures” to obey him, and he doesn’t dwell upon the consequences of his actions. His outlook changes after the Creature comes to life. As Victor stares into the watery, lifeless eyes of his creature, he finally realizes his mistake in trying to disrupt the natural order of the world. Scared by the outcome of his actions, Victor attempts to run away and find comfort in nature. He travels to the Arve Ravine, where “the
If Victor had stayed around and showed the monster the real world, he might have not have went on to perform violent actions. This portrays Victor as a selfish character and gives more of an insight on his personal life. As a child, Victor is only interested in furthering his own knowledge and not worried about anyone else. He spent much of his time “drawing the picture of [his] early days... when [he] would account to [himself] for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled [his] destiny” (Shelley 34), or otherwise a magnificent creation that would change his future. When constructing the Monster, he put all of his relatives in the back of his mind, and only focused on his own success and victory. This further explains the theme of being selfless and only doing certain things that will benefit
With nobody to reason with, Victor makes senseless decisions while he is alone. Victor begins this with his process of creating the monster. Nobody in the right mind would ever dig up graves, but that is just what victor goes and does. Once this creation is finally given life, which Victor has spent two years striving for, Victor foolishly abandons it. Victor comes to his senses to some degree after he brings life to the monster as he states, “‘now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream had vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley 43). Had there been companions around Victor during this creation time, perhaps someone would have been able to guide Victor away from creating the “wretch” (Shelley 43) he so hopelessly conceived. As for the monster, he makes fairly good decisions even without guidance from anyone, including Victor, his creator. The monster has the desire to learn and gain knowledge as a genuine individual. As the monster is continuously rejected and shunned by mankind, his natural benevolence turns to malevolence. In his loneliness, the monster wrongly decides to declare “‘everlasting war against the species, and more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery’” (Shelley 126). Say the monster was able to have comrades of some kind around him, he would not have turned to this
After bringing life to something seemingly horrible, Victor Frankenstein reveals his personality of avoidance and arrogance. Instead of facing the creature he created, he runs away from the problem. His motivations for the experiment vary, but there is one clear one that he even admits. "The world," he says, "was to me a secret which I desired to divine" (Shelley 18). Victor tells us that he's curious, and more importantly that he's always been this way. Victor has been raised in a very loving family. His father and mother were kind parents who loved all of their children, and even adopted some children. Victor, however, grows up a little indulged and perhaps because of this, he is selfish. He is stubborn and unyielding about many things. For
Frankenstein defied human boundaries when he created the monster and because of this not only his life, but the lives of others have also shifted, this has caused their lives to spiral into an unjustified conclusion. Curiosity was the main cause of him learning how to create such a thing, his lack of caring for the thing that he created led to his undoing. His motivation for creating life, comes from the fact that he lost someone dear to him. Although Victor was young when his mother died, it had serious effects on the way he viewed life and maybe even himself. Once you take on the father role you have to stick to it, otherwise creating life
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
Victor is so engulfed by his work that he is unaware of what is going on around him. He “bore onwards [with his work], like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success” and he wants to “pour a torrent of light into our dark world" (Shelley 55). Blinded by his yearning for making new discoveries, Victor thinks that his knowledge of the sciences will be enough for him to be successful. However, he does not understand that in order to create an auspicious relationship between him and his creation, he needs to have knowledge of society as well. Once his creation is animated, Victor is unable to see that all the creature wants is to be loved and accepted. The creature craves the maternal love that Victor denies him. From the beginning, Victor is unable to realize the significance of his creation. He describes how the creature’s “yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath... [and] his hair was of a lustrous black... [and] his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips” (Shelley 58). He immediately focuses on the negative features of his creation, and does not even attempt to learn the positive qualities. If Victor uses more social skills, rather than his knowledge of the sciences to manage his creation, all of the destruction the creation causes could have been
Victor was born into a happy family and they lived in Geneva. His parents then adopted Elizabeth, whom he immediately felt a strong sense of possession towards. At a young age, Victor was always obsessed with alchemy and constantly divulged in experiments to prove the words of the mad men who wrote the ancient texts. When his mother died after her attempt to care for Elizabeth, Victor was sent to Ingolstadt where his interest swayed from alchemy to modern knowledge. In Ingolstadt, he became fascinated with the human body: “One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted [his] attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life” (36). Learning from his professor M. Krempe, he decided to delve into the discovery of “the secrets of heaven and earth” (23).
Furthermore, after his creation breathes its first breath, Victor already despises it, which leads to his health’s deterioration and hatred of his previous love. His love quickly changes to despise when he says, “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (53). His statement shows how his heart does a complete 1800 and stops loving the monster the moment it lives. When Victor’s “…heart palpitated in the sickness of fear…” (54), it proves how his monster tormented his creator without having to be near him. Which also leads to the teaching of the lesson “think before you act”.
The pursuit of knowledge is at the heart of Frankenstein, as Victor attempts to go beyond the acceptable human limits and access the secret of life. Victor's experiment created in the name of science holds the key to which Victor believes is his future success. "The accomplishment of his toils" is a monstrous male figure created from parts of other corpses which he brings to life through his work (Frankenstein, 34). Victor's motivation for success and scientific exploration drive him to play God. "It was the secrets of heaven and earth that [he] desired to learn; and whether it was the ...
From the onset of Victor’s youth, his earliest memories are those of “Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember” (ch. 4) This is the first example of obsession that we see in the novel. This drive to learn the ‘hidden’ laws of nature is the original driving force that sets the plot in motion. Without this, Victor would have never embarked on his unholy quest to overcome mortality, thus leading to his creation of his monster.
When Victor flees the creature, he becomes lonely and unhappy. He rejects his own works. If he stayed and taught him the creature would at least have a chance of happiness. When the monster flees to the cottagers he learns about human nature. He quotes “I continued for the remainder of the day in my hovel in a state of utter and stupid despair. My protector had departed and broken the only link that held me to th...
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.
Victor has a lack of respect for the natural world that leads him on the path to becoming a monster. In creating the monster Victor is trying to change the natural world. He is trying to play the role of god by creating life.
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.