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Victor's Responsibility In Frankenstein

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“For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator towards his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.” (Shelley 70/71)
In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein from 1808 Victor Frankenstein decides to awake a being out of several dead body parts and tries to make afterlife possible after the death of his loved mother. Driven by his pursuit of success he does not take consequences or failure into account. This paper argues to what extend the creator Victor Frankenstein is responsible for the creature he has developed and could have prevented the loss of his loved ones killed by the monster due to revenge.
What should be taken into account first is, that Frankenstein was a young man. He was seventeen years old (25) when he left his family and moved to Ingolstadt to study science at the university. On his idea “of infusing life into an inanimate body” (35) he worked in total about two years, so he was 21 years old when his creature awoke. With the age of 21 you might be an adult on paper, but you are still naive and have less life experience then older people might have. This could be a reason why Frankenstein dreams he can advance science in the fields of death and afterlife …show more content…

He laid all his hope on it and worked hard. First he seems to be like a proud father, who talks about his child. “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! - Great God!” (35) But Frankenstein’s attitude towards his creature changed, when it was finally alive. It was the moment he has been waiting for years and now he was appalled. “I felt bitterness of disappointment: dreams that had been my food and pleasant rest for so long a space, were now become a hell to me; and the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!” (36/37) And so he leaves his being alone – leaves his kid alone because of his “inability to tolerate extreme ugliness” (Bann

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