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Examples Of Make Way For The New Oedipus

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Make Way for the New Oedipus: Victor Frankenstein!
How could Victor Frankenstein, protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, know that imbuing life to inanimate matter would bring so much sorrow? After creating a creature from corpses and animating it, Frankenstein’s life spirals downhill. The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is a tragedy in of Ancient Greek style. This essay will prove this thesis by showing how the plot structure matches the Ancient Greek tragedies, describing Frankenstein’s peripeteia, and by defining Frankenstein as a tragic hero.
Frankenstein exhibits the Greek tragedy plot structure with an inciting incident, multiple peripeteia, a climax, a catastrophe, and a resolution. The following quotation describes Frankenstein’s …show more content…

Here, Victor incredulously ponders his mother’s death, sparking his idea to reanimate life. The climax occurs when the newly married Victor expects the creature to kill him, in Volume III, Chapter VI: “But I discovered no trace of him, and was beginning to conjecture that some fortunate chance had intervened to prevent the execution of his menaces when suddenly I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room into which Elizabeth had retired” (Shelley 187). In a cruel twist of fate, the creature kills Victor’s wife Elizabeth instead of Victor. The grief Victor feels, along with his guilt of the deaths of all his other friends and family comes crashing down upon him in the catastrophe a few lines later: “This reflection brought tears to my eyes, and I wept, for a long time; but my thoughts rambled to various subjects, reflecting on my misfortunes, and their cause” (Shelley 189). The deaths of Victor’s brother William, his friends …show more content…

The first change of Victor’s fortune comes after Victor animates the creature, in a letter from his father: “William is dead! ‒that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay! Victor, he is murdered!” (Shelley 62). Victor soon realizes that the creature was the murderer. Victor knew that, as he brought the creature into being, he was responsible for this and its following crimes. The second peripeteia appears when Victor meets the creature once again, and the creature related his story, requesting something only Victor could accomplish: “I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create” (Shelley 137). Victor agrees to create a wife for the creature, provided that the creature leaves humanity forever, but he soon makes a decision which changes his fate. The third peripeteia occurs in Volume III, Chapter III: “I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged” (Shelley 160). Victor realizes that the woman creature might not agree to what the creature agreed to, or that the two creatures could bring

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