Over all I do think that this was very well written. I leave my mark on this ancient text, pissing on it in delight. Thank you for this, there are some insightful comparisons here. Would you like to have all your work done in one webite?
You can do it all here…Visit us… Add Hunters. Your email address will not be published. The overall character motivations create a divide in my mind between the two characters.
I believe that there is a very large, gaping distance between the desire to do something because you like or care about someone vs. Another thing to think about is the idea that Prometheus cares for his creations. There are certain myths in which Prometheus himself created mankind, or at least a specific surviving age of it. This creation of mankind goes hand in hand with the care for them, and the overall desire to provide them with what they need i.
When you look at the relationship between Frankenstein and what he creates, the first thing you get is terror. No desire to protect or help, simply an instant regret for having created what he sees as an atrocity. The fatherly nature that Prometheus takes towards humans is a key part of his being known and remembered—along with the trickery and intelligence. I feel like looking at the overall story of Frankenstein, that there may be a tad bit of a different outcome there.
He learns from the cottagers speech, letters, and reads some of the classics of literature, that he finds in a bag in the woods. Adam is driven from Eden for disobeying God and eating the fruit of knowledge. The monster, however, has done nothing to deserve being driven forth, instead he was abandoned, something God never did to Adam even when he drove him out of Eden. The cottagers however, drive him forth once they set eyes on his hideousness, despite the good deeds he has done for them and his supplications for pity.
His heart so hardened, he set out to punish his creator. His request of Frankenstein is this, create a female for him or suffer quick and abiding ruin. After originally refusing, Frankenstein consents, then nearing completion of the woman he again refuses and destroys her. Prometheus worked ceaselessly as a creator on behalf of his creation, as do most creator figures in mythology. Frankenstein does not. Quite the contrary he tries to ignore his creation and to curse it.
That act, of course, brings with it curses. In the end both Frankenstein and Prometheus come to ruin, but whereas Prometheus is eventually vindicated and released from his agony, Frankenstein finds only an agonizing death, his duty to his creation unfinished. Many early nineteenth-century readers would have been familiar with and perhaps even have witnessed infamous public experiments where human and animal corpses jerked briefly to life through the application of electricity.
I have a rather unpleasant image of Victor wandering around England for some time with two hundred pounds of grave-robbed body parts in a steamer trunk, taking them out each night to dry them on racks before the fire. One does rather wonder how effective mummified testes are in producing viable creature germ cells. But the creature has a fatal flaw as well: it is his desire for vengeance when he is ostracized. Thus, failing to consider the impact of his decisions on the creature he creates and then compounding that failure with selfishness and lack of compassion, Victor causes the very carnage that so desolates him.
And so he becomes the author of his own ruined life and of the ruined lives of so many more innocent others. This relationship is pointed out quite brilliantly at the climax of the book, when Walton is confronted by the remainder of his fast-dying crew, who wish to abandon their quest for the Northwest Passage and return to warmer southern waters.
Victor berates them as cowards, almost literally with his last breath. Walton stands in contrast to Victor in this choice, which creates a thematic counterpoint to those decisions Victor makes that destroy him and his much-abused family and friends. In fact, Walton treats his own quest for knowledge responsibly. He considers the well-being of others, and he maintains his human connection to his family—personified by a beloved sister to whom he writes at every opportunity—throughout his adventures.
That he turns back is not a scientific defeat—he makes no grand declarations about the impossibility of his quest for knowledge and pens no polemics about the uselessness of further ventures. Rather, Walton demonstrates a simple acceptance that Victor never manages to embrace: other human lives have worth and value. Even those of a group of nameless sailors.
This was my duty; but there was another still paramount to that. He does not number his own creation among his fellow creatures, although in truth he owes it a greater debt than he does to any other person because he is responsible for its existence and abandonment.
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