Similarities Between Macbeth And Frankenstein

Why do readers feel sometimes extreme sorrow for the negative characters in a novel? It’s not their fault that the main character made a mistake and ended up ruining their life. Sometimes the characters deserve what’s coming to them, depending on the magnitude of their blunder. There’s no need to give pity to those who bring pain upon themselves; nobody pities a serial killer, yet in Frankenstein, the creature, which is in essence a serial killer, is given sympathy by the viewer and it doesn’t seem logical. In Macbeth, the reader gives compassion out to both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth for the grief they give themselves, while they kill people and feel terrible upon realizing their own actions. Even though the characters in these pieces of literature

Lady Macbeth is a power-hungry woman, and she succeeds that through her husband. She encourages and provokes him to kill others, while slowly deteriorating due to the guilt in her conscience. At the beginning of the epic, both Lady Macbeth and Macbeth seem to be decent enough people, and therefore bring the readers to be more open to feeling compassionate and sympathetic towards them. As the poem goes on, the audience learns about how many people Macbeth is killing and how Lady Macbeth is promoting him to do this, in order to sate her need for control. The reader loses sympathy, and then ends up rooting for Macduff as he beheads Macbeth. This also happens with Frankenstein, when it is revealed that the monster killed William, and Victor finally goes and seeks him in order to stop him and hopefully destroy him. The death of the creature is what the reader wants, even after sympathizing with him when he tells the story of how he began his life. Even when Victor dies first, the reader feels a sense of closure as the monster tells Walton he’s going to burn himself. This shows how even though at first a reader may be oblivious as to the evils the character has done, they still end up pitying them if tragedy strikes, sometimes even after they learn the character is an antagonist or the

An antagonist goes against the morals of the protagonist, and Victor clearly isn’t that, and an anti-hero doesn’t have the conventional attributes of an average saviour of the day, which is shown in Victor. He doesn’t exactly fix anything, or save any lives. In fact, even when he did try to save his bride, he couldn’t even manage to do that. He was too busy watching his own back to realize that his creature could be going after Elizabeth. This showed off his hubris; he was too arrogant and worried about his own well-being to think about protecting his bride. If he would have just sat down and thought for a second before going off the deep end and becoming paranoid to the extreme, he would most likely have realized that the creature wouldn’t just target him, and he could have saved her. Because of his overreactions to the creation of the monster in the beginning, and now the overreaction during his wedding night, his family and wife ends up dead, and there is no one to blame but himself. He still should not be sympathized for; his ignorance and his theatrical emotions drove him to become a wreck, ruining his life and killing his loved ones and in the end, himself as well. His fatal flaw ended up being the death of him, and he has no reason to be pitied for; he had enough pity for himself, and did not require any more from the