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He fails to believe that any unintended consequences would be negative enough to make him regret his decision. He simply does not see what he does not want to see. We all do this at one point or another when we want something. However, Victor's choices involve other people and he demonstrates he does not care. He realizes he is "solely wrapped up" (36) with his experiment and does not care. Here we see how knowledge is dangerous because it becomes more important than life itself.
The thirst of knowledge is linked to destruction as we watch the events of Victor's life unfold. The most important fact we see as Victor recounts his tale to Robert is how Victor could not the danger he is now expressing to Robert while he was in the middle of it. Victor was too consumed with his dream to see all the destruction around him. It takes losing all of the important people in his life to bring him around. Until he comes to this realization, he believes he is the "chosen" one upon which secrets of the universe will fall. He describes a light that:
Broke in upon me-- a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that so many men of genus who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. (37)
Victor is completely narcissistic at this point and there is little anyone can do to bring him back into the real world. He believes he is special and that he has some sort of special connection to universal knowledge no one else is...
Here we see that knowledge is self-destructive. Victor puts himself first and believes himself to be somehow better than everyone else because he is enlightened.
The ultimate example of how knowledge is dangerous is when Victor achieves his goal and finds himself looking at the creature he made. He is not filled with love and adoration but fear and disgust. Only in looking back can he admit that he mistakenly thought if he "could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption" (39). He can only realize he was wrong after he sees the horrible mistake he made. It takes the ugly truth for him to realize he is not special or enlightened. In addition, he did not make his life any better. The creature kills everyone Victor loves and Victor resigns himself to chasing it through the frozen tundra. This was not what he had in mind when he worked through the night studying the human form and dreaming of creating life. Victor's story is not completely lost because he is able to persuade Robert to rethink his notions of discovery. Victor's mental state and his story, wild as it is, compels Robert to turn away from the promise of knowledge, realizing how we perceive things to be rarely ever turn out to be the truth. Shelley proves this with Victor, a man mesmerized with the beauty of life. He saw the beauty of life and thought he could capture and recreate it but found he was nothing more than a fool for thinking he could be greater than his nature would allow.
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Work Cited
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
He tells Walton he was "surprised that among so many men of genius . . . that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret" (37). Here Shelley illuminates the weakness of man with Frankenstein's inability to control himself in this situation. Shelley placed Frankenstein in this environment because he represented "modern scientist is search of the spark to animate lifeless matter" (Wright 14). Like Prometheus,
Frankenstein "You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires," (Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 24) Frankenstein's monster remains one of the most misunderstood characters
Here the man understands his fate and realizes that he will have a difficult time trying to convince others not to follow in his path. Not all is lost, however. Victor does influence someone in a positive way before he leaves this earth and that person is Robert Walton. While we only see him at the beginning and end of the novel, he is significant to the story because he,
Frankenstein An Analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote in her 1831 introduction to the reprint of Frankenstein that "supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" (x). These words not only indicate the manner of her thought on the night she conceived the idea for her gothic novel, they also reflect, as she notes, the ideas
If you reanimate dead flesh then how do you kill it? Victor, on his death bed, intones to his new friend the Captain of the discovery vessel that ambition in science should be kept in check, even if that means death in anonymity. He first intones that he regrets that he is dying while the beast still lives and then warns the captain to keep his ambition in check. That he
He notes that at the time of the novel's publication, there was growing concern and distrust for unregulated scientific experimentation. He claims that these beliefs "so successfully dominated the cultural sphere that the word "Frankenstein" was soon used to refer to the creature created by the scientist rather than the scientist himself. Frankenstein, therefore, became the monstrous and supernatural offspring of the practices of science" (Willis 236). Mellor suggests