The Two Monsters In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

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The Two Monsters of Frankenstein The main ingredients in creating a monster, in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, are obsession, selfishness, and doomed loneliness. Shelley creates not one but two monsters in the novel. Shelley shows Victor as the selfish and obsessed monster that created a living creature dooming it to forever loneliness. Shelley's other monster is the creature that Victor made that is rejected by everybody due to his ugliness. Victor is a monster by selfishly remaining quiet about the creature as more and more lives are taken. When William dies Victor finds that the creature he created is responsible and he says nothing. Victor reasons with,“Who could arrest a creature capable of scaling the overhanging sides…show more content…
He risks the lives of all the men on the ship that rescues him. When the sailors say they want to return because of the danger Victor states, “ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards.”(160) Victor's obsession is so bad that he risks harm to his own life as well. He says, “How I have lived I hardly know: many times have I stretched my failing limbs upon the sandy plain, and prayed for death. But revenge kept me alive; I dared not die, and leave my adversary in…show more content…
At one point the creature states, “I cherished hope, it is true; but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water, or my shadow in the moonshine.”(93) At another point he asks Victor, “But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles....”(86) When creature saves the little girl out of kindness he is shot by an approaching man who sees his ugliness. The creature says, “ The feelings of kindness and gentleness, which I had entertained but a few moments before, gave place to hellish rage and gnashing teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind.”(101) Even his well thought out plan to get through to the family of cottagers by using the blind man was spoiled by his looks. He decides yet again, “No: from that moment I declared ever-lasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him whom had formed me, and sent me forth into this insupportable misery.”(97) When the creature realizes that he will never be accepted by society because of his looks he comes up with one last plan. He asks Victor to create a “companion.” Victor's promise to do this temporarily calms the monster within the creature until Victor goes back on his promise. Upon finding this out the monster within him resurfaces and he asks, “Are
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