Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Victor Frankenstein
- Ambitious
- Scientific hubris: wants to
defy the laws of nature
- Blinded by his passion
- Play God
- AO4: Compare to Prometheus - title
'Frankenstein or The Moden
Prometheus'
- Selfish
- Creates the monster to
manipulate life, not learn
from the experience
- "A new species would bless me
as its creator and source; many
happy and excellent natures
would owe their being to me"
- Completely ignores his family
back in Geneva - expects
Elizabeth to wait for him
(postpones their wedding
while he goes to England).
- Once he succeeds in
creating the monster, he
runs away, claiming he
was protecting his own
life
- This shows how shallow he is
"unable to endure the aspect of
the being [he] had created"
- AO3: Critic - As Lunsford points out:
"Upon discovering the secret to
reanimating dead corpses, Victor
endeavors to create a being like
himself."
- He does not consider how his
actions will affect anyone but
himself
- Wants to destroy
the monster to
clear his name
- Isolated
- Victor's downfall is his
lack of humaneness
- He cuts himself off from society
and his family, and then runs
away from the only other person
he has in his life; his creation
- Unreliable
- Slow decent into madness:
"no one can conceive the
variety of feelings which bore
me onwards, like a hurricane"
- He wants the reader to feel the same way he does about the monster
- Attempts to manipulate the reader through his
use of self-pitying, self-deprecating language:
"But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered
my soul" - but his is not what the monster has
done to him, it is what he has done to himself
- It is an epistolary novel - the monster
told Victor his story; Victor is now
retelling their combined stories to Walton
so it is impossible to know the accuracy