Victor Frankenstein - Thematic Explorer Term Paper

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With this confession, Victor is telling Walton that he is a broken man because of his inner desires to explore the unknown and by pretending that like God he has control over his own destiny and that of the creature he created. Thematically, Victor is relating that the pursuit of knowledge can often be a very dangerous affair.

At the point when the creature begins to show some movement upon the laboratory table, Victor realizes that he has made an abomination to nature. Later on, he relates a portion of what he calls his "wildest dreams": "I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health... I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death... her features appeared to change, and I thought I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the folds of her flannel." And then, upon awaking from this hideous nightmare, Victor "beheld the wretch -- the miserable monster whom I had created" (52).

This demonstrates the very depths of Victor's obsessive mind for exploration which has resulted in a crime against nature and womanhood, being an attempt to circumvent normal sexual practices as shared between husband and wife. For Mary Shelley, this represents the ultimate symbol of man's egotism, the supreme turning away from human society and into the self, the "id" which must result in utter desolation and self-rejection.

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On the morning after creating the monster, Victor goes for a walk, "endeavouring, by bodily exercise, to ease the load that weighed upon my mind." And with his heart palpitating "in the sickness of fear," he is reminded of the great poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge -- "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" which relates "Like one who, on a lonely road/Doth walk in fear and dread/and, having once turned round, walks on/and turns no more his head/Because he knows a frightful fiend/Doth close behind him tread" (53). This passage is very powerful in its imagery, for it shows that Victor realizes his failure as an explorer of the unknown, due to creating "a frightful fiend" in the form of the monster.

The theme of the curious explorer of the unknown in Frankenstein powerfully indicates that exploration of any kind, especially in the biological sciences, may result in finding that "frightful fiend" which one does not want to uncover. With his dying breath, Victor tells Captain Walton to "seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition" (236), meaning that man must not tread where he does not belong......

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