Karissa Blythe Mrs. Wu Pd.1/ English CP 2 23 March 2023 The Consequences of Playing God In her novel, Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelly uses the characterization of Victor Frankenstein and the conflicts he encounters to convey how there are boundaries science should not cross. This is evidenced by his curiosity. His attempts to cheat death, and his toying with life, or playing God. Victor's curiosity feeds into his search for ways to cheat death, and his ultimate choice to play God and create life against the natural laws. This path leads to his downfall at the end of the novel. Victor's curiosity begins at a fundamental stage in his childhood, causing a turn in his path, and changing the course of his life forever. As a …show more content…
He feels like God, creating a life of his own that he must be held responsible for as an attempt at enteral life. In performing his experiments, Victor states, “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”(58) His creation is successful, Victor does create life from death, but not in the way Victor expected. He neglects his creation, realizing his greed for power has already initiated his downfall. Soon enough after his neglect, the creation becomes lonely, and he threatens Victor with the promise to murder the people Victor loved if he did not create him a companion. Victor describes the process of creating a second creature, “In the meantime, I worked on; and my labour was already considerably advanced. I looked towards its completion with tremulous hope, which I dared not trust myself to question but when I was intermixed with obscure foreboding of evil that made my heart sicken in my bosom.”(178) Although he had done it once before, which the experiment went horribly wrong, Victor attempts the experiment once again, only this time out of self-preservation and the preservation of the few people Victor had left that he