Victor's Obsession In Frankenstein, we learn of a man named Victor Frankenstein. He is very intelligent, and also loves his family. However, during his endeavors to create life, he sacrifices his relationship with his family. When he tries to redeem himself for his mistakes, it is much too late. A majority of his friends and family are now dead. Unfortunately, Victor lost sight of what he truly loved, and it cost him dearly. Starting out, Victor was fascinated with science and obsessed over the secret of life. Learning everything he could at the university at Ingolstadt, he had finally obtained the proper knowledge to make an attempt at creating life, and so he did. This was his first step towards alienation of his family. The death of his …show more content…
Vengeance is certainly an underlying theme. This is carried out mostly by the monster, but Victor is eventually consumed by it towards the end. The monster wanted to cause Victor suffering as punishment for creating him, and more so later for taking away his potential mate. Victor destroyed the mate not only for revenge, but also for what he saw as the greater good. Vengeance is a vicious cycle, and it is clearly displayed in this story as the two main characters go back and forth. One could argue that both had legitimate reasons for their mistreatment of one another. Victor, for regretting completing his abomination of a creation; the monster, for having no form of mentorship or companionship. One thing is for sure, however; Victor made the first move by creating the creature in the first place. Benford …show more content…
The monster causes by far the most damage in terms of their rivalry. He murders three of Victor's loved ones, and indirectly is the cause of two additional deaths. Victor only destroys the monster's mate. That is how it looks on paper. Many see Victor as the victim, while the monster is a force of relentless evil. However, we now know the misdeeds that Victor has done to the monster. His lack of mentorship of the monster is truly what defines the monster's evil. Not only is Victor cruel to the monster, but we have also discussed how frequently he neglected his family. He was so consumed by his obsession with creating, fearing, and subduing the monster, that he often overlooked what was really important to
Consequently, Victor creates a monster that later ruins his life and the lives of those around him in the story mostly due to his poor variety of decisions. These facts proves that Victor’s downfall is most likely caused by his failure of balancing his ego by allowing his Id and superego get to him. In the novel
Victor denied the monster it’s power by not allowing it to have what it asked for. This refusal caused the monster declare it’s dominance through threatening Victor to do as it says or he will be punished. After Victor refuses to allow his creation to take control, it goes mayhem and reacts with hatred. The creature tried to gain it’s power by deteriorating Victor’s life killing many of the friends and loved ones close to Victor. This pulls the final straw for Victor, he attempted to hunt the monster down and destroy it before it could hurt anyone else.
However, it is Victor that is the bigger monster in the book. He shows unparalleled selfishness and hostility towards the creature, and is also the initiator of all the subsequent events that occur after he creates it. Even when he first creates the creature, Victor displays hostility towards the creature. He immediately abandons it after seeing its appearance, and judges it based solely on it’s looks. “But now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Life can be rough, and both Victor and the monster figure this out in specific ways. Victor begins by being a dedicated and persistent young lad who just wanted to get his name out there, but his obsession sent him into a spiraling descent into madness; however, the monster figures this out by getting abused, tormented, and treated like a megalomaniac even though all he did was be nice and helpful to everyone he came across. To make things worse, these changes impacted both characters in very bad ways personally. The transformations significantly impacted the way they lived and thought, even bringing on suicidal thinking. If the story would have been any bit different in terms of having a positive change, then the story probably would not have been as entertaining to the audience as it is currently, and in addition, Victor and the monster would have had better lives.
(Shelly 69) What Victor endured in the past still fuelled his hate and anger towards the creature. This hate consumed his whole being leading him to parade such savagery to the creature. Through the cruelty he shows buth his own body and the creature we can see Victor's selfishness.
Grendel vs. “The monster” Grendel in the novel by John Gardner is very similar to “the monster” in Frankenstein by Mary Shelly because both Grendel and the monster feel like outsiders, they kill humans, and they both are able to learn new things. Grendel feels like an outsider because he knows he is different and he wants to know the truth of why he is what he is and why God made him that way. Grendel asks his mother “Why are we here?” which means that he is doubting his existence. Grendel kills humans in the mead hall while they are asleep.
Victor had to deal with all the guilt and take responsibility for all the bad things the creature had done because he created and left the creature. “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep”(Shelley 49). Victor realized what he created and could not even sleep knowing that he created a “monster”. His abandonment of the creature was even worse, because he let the creature out into the real world with no knowledge or morals. “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.
Victor creates the Creature, but there are many situations throughout the novel where the Monster displays as the victim. He seeks love from different people, but everyone treats him bad. His anger towards his father drives him to kill Victor’s family. The Monster later feels devastated for the murders he commits. All the monster wants is love.
Victor would stop at nothing to finish his project and became so obsessed that he was isolated from his family and friends. His way of collecting lifeless matter for his creation is unethical and morally wrong. Eventually, he is punished for his actions: “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.” (pg.56) Additionally, extreme devotion to the building of his creation caused Victor mental distress due to the fact that he neglected his own needs in order to work exclusively on the creature: “I had deprived myself of rest and health.”
Mary Shelley shows the endless amount of revenge and that it is driven by pure hatred and rage. The monster was not created to be vengeful, he was kind hearted but when he was poorly treated by Victor and then by the Delacey family, he turned cold. In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley displays the immorality and destructive effects that revenge can have through Frankenstein and his pursuit of the creature. Immediately after the monster had awoken, hatred thickened and would drive the plot to be all about revenge. The creature illustrates this hatred as he says to Victor, “Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view;
When people hear the word “monster”, most people imagine a massive, horrid, and grotesque figure that haunts people. While pondering what a monster is, mankind thinks of the outward appearance. Seldom do people think of man’s internal qualities as being barbaric or gruesome. Authors allow readers to create their own images of these terrifying beings. Frankenstein is a thought-provoking novel that empowers readers to have their own opinions about who the actual monster is and what it looks like.
He uses the little that he knows to fuel his hatred towards humans and his creator. This shows the exponential growth of the problems that Victor has created as a result of his desire for knowledge. Not only did he create the destructive monster, but now the monster is using a hunger for knowledge, the very thing that created it, to do even more damage. This root cause is linked to everything that is causing Victor’s suffering. The monster also compares his relationship to Victor to that of God and Adam, wishing that he had the same supplication to his creator that Adam did, “I remembered Adam’s supplication to his creator.
Victor had two loving parents that gave him everything he ever needed or wanted to fulfill his physiological and emotional needs. Since Victor did not do this for his monster, the monster would kill all of Victor’s family and friends that he loved which would bring destruction to Victor’s life. For the rest of his days, Victor would go on a search for his monster to destroy it or die trying. Unlike Victor, the monster was never loved because of the way he looked. He was left alone, even by his creator, and lived a miserable life always escaping people that would “attacked [him], until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kinds of missile weapons” (Shelley).
It is quite telling that the most severe punishment in our society other than the death penalty or torture is solitary confinement. Although, isolation is in itself a form of torture, it can drive someone to the brink of insanity. Although published nearly 200 years ago, Mary Shelley clearly understood the potential detrimental effects of isolation, as demonstrated in her famous novel, Frankenstein, where both main characters, Victor Frankenstein and his creation, suffer from and cause isolation for the other. Mary Shelley directs the reader to believe that isolation is the true evil, not the monster, Victor or any emotion inside of them. At the beginning of the novel, Victor is isolated from other people, causing to forget his scientific
Victor’s parental figures in Frankenstein poison him by surrounding him with countless indulgences. From childhood, Victor was given all of his desires without question and this led to him becoming self-centered and dependent on the service of others. Victor describes his childhood with