ipl-logo

The Thirst For Knowledge In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

817 Words4 Pages

The thirst for knowledge :
We have explored from many different angles of the contrast between Frankenstein and the monster . However , every story has a beginning , and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein starts off with a man called Robert Walton who is on his interest for his own greedy thirst of knowledge . Shelley begins Walton story though emotional letters written to his beloved sister . Through these letters , we can understand in great details that Walton’s set a ship to the cold and icy Arctic ocean to discover the North Pole . Walton thought he is a genius and he is the only man in the earliest memories of his youth desired to learn about the world , and natural sciences . Walton quoted , “This expedition has been the favourite dream …show more content…

This is the warning given by Victor to Walton before telling his new friend the story where he suppressed search for the knowledge has taken him . While we and Walton are listening to his story , we found a familiarity between the two men . Both of them are from a family that encourage them and are both captivated by natural philosophy . We and Walton could feel the “delight and rapture” as Victor discovers the key thing to revive a life . We are suffering by the scary details when Victor is creating the monster and we are wondrous when the monster came to life . From this point , Victor is now being chase to explain his creation . The anxiety fills the space between the narrator and contemplation which also feels our trembling heart as well .
In the story , Walton is the pathway for us to know about Victor and the monster in the very beginning of the story . However , he also plays a role that is parallel to Victor in many ways . Both Victor and Walton are explorer ,they chase after their dangerous knowledge . Victor’s influence to Walton is rather weird . For a moment , he warned Walton to be courageous on the path , regardless of the danger , and the next moment he serves as an example of the dangers of thirsting of knowledge and ambition . This is a deep impression of the contrasting emotions felt between the chase and consequence

Show More
Related
462 Words | 2 Pages

The Revengeful Montresor In the short story “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe, Montresor tells a tale about a crime he committed fifty years ago. He goes into detail about how he hated the arrogant Fortunato and how well he planned this perfect crime. A brief examination of “The Cask of Amontillado” reveals Montresor as astute and organized.

Read More
977 Words | 4 Pages

Knowledge can be Blessings and Curse A teenage girl Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in the 18th century. A Gothic novel Frankenstein deals with two genres, Gothicism and science fiction. Victor, one of Mary Shelly’s characters represents man’s pursuit of knowledge which ultimately leads towards the path of destruction while another character Robert Walton implemented his knowledge wisely to get benefits for the society. Mary is indicating to the society that mankind has to pay full attention to science and scientific innovations in order to avoid the catastrophic events due to misuse of knowledge.

Read More
672 Words | 3 Pages

He uses the little that he knows to fuel his hatred towards humans and his creator. This shows the exponential growth of the problems that Victor has created as a result of his desire for knowledge. Not only did he create the destructive monster, but now the monster is using a hunger for knowledge, the very thing that created it, to do even more damage. This root cause is linked to everything that is causing Victor’s suffering. The monster also compares his relationship to Victor to that of God and Adam, wishing that he had the same supplication to his creator that Adam did, “I remembered Adam’s supplication to his creator.

Read More
499 Words | 2 Pages

The story of Victor and the creature is told to Robert Walton, and the entire book was based out of his eyes and what was told to him by Frankenstein. The reader may be missing a key part of the relationship between Victor and the creature but the readers will never know because the book can only have in it what Robert Walton was told by Victor. Robert Walton only has a minimal part in the text of the play, but his role in helping the reader relate to Victor is bigger than every other character in the

Read More
543 Words | 3 Pages

Coming into the novel, Walton’s search transforms to Victor’s obsession in natural philosophy where he ventures to find the secret of life. Victor intends to let light into the

Read More
454 Words | 2 Pages

He is saying that he left everything for his relentless search of knowledge and forgetting about his physical. I think that his suffering is do to the doubts that he had about life. When Victor gave life to the monster, he couldn’t believe the appearance of the monster that he just run away. This was another problem that caused his suffering because of his absences on taking care of the creature. Because of his lack of human appearance, society making something bad awake inside him rejects the monster.

Read More
661 Words | 3 Pages

In the novel “Frankenstein”, written by Mary Shelley in 1818, illustrates the human nature in which consists of ambition versus responsibility as well as innocent versus evil. At the beginning of the story, Captain Robert Walton is introduced as the first character by narrating in the series of letters that he writes to his sister, Margaret Saville. Walton functions as a foil character for Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist and main narrator. By contrasting and highlighting Victor’s characteristics in the book, they have similarities in the desire of acknowledgment in achievement, loneliness, and differences in the realization of life.

Read More
1619 Words | 7 Pages

This foreshadows that once Walton hears Frankenstein’s story, he will change his mind about his expedition. Also, during the thunderstorm that happened in Victor’s childhood, Victor sees a tree get struck by lightning. He becomes interested in the idea of electricity, and he starts to study its

Read More
1003 Words | 5 Pages

Instead of starting at the beginning of his life, she begins at the end and allows him to tell his own story. Walton remarks to his sister that he found the man drifting on a sledge on a slab of ice, "nearly frozen…and deadly emaciated by fatigue and suffering" (15). By introducing him in this way, Shelley catches the reader’s interest from the start, causing them to wonder what brought this man to the arctic in such a condition. After Frankenstein catches Walton up on the events that brought him thus far, Walton provides Shelley a way to tell the end of the story as well. Because Shelley wrote these portions as letters, they remain separate from the rest of the narrative, making the switch between Walton and Frankenstein less awkward and opening the door to develop her story and characters in a

Read More
1921 Words | 8 Pages

The fictional horror novel of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is driven by the accentuation of humanity’s flaws. Even at the very mention of her work an archetypal monster fills one’s imagination, coupled with visions of a crazed scientist to boot. Opening her novel with Robert Walton, the conduit of the story, he also serves as a character to parallel the protagonist’s in many ways. As the ‘protagonist’ of the story, Victor Frankenstein, takes on the mantle of the deluded scientist, his nameless creation becomes the embodiment of a truly abandoned child – one left to fend for itself against the harsh reality posed by society. On the other hand, Walton also serves as a foil to Victor – he is not compulsive enough to risk what would be almost

Read More
641 Words | 3 Pages

As a society we all seek answers to how God did it or question how we all got here, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the key theme is the thirst for knowledge. Throughout the novel there are three prominent characters that seek for the understanding of life, including Victor Frankenstein, the creature, and Walton. The most important character involved with this particular theme is Victor Frankenstein, it all starts with his curiosity. Victor’s curiosity sparks with the statement that “The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine” (2.1).

Read More
1039 Words | 5 Pages

After giving much thought on what I wanted to do in the future, I found University of California at Los Angeles to be an excellent stepping stone for my aspiration as a computer scientist. I’ve come to a decision to apply to UCLA because I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps as a computer scientist, and what better way to start, by applying to the same college that my brother attended and graduated. With the encouragement from my brother supporting me behind my back, I strongly believe that UCLA will widen my horizon, improve me as a person, and hope to have a glimpse of what my brother had experienced when he took his first step into the campus. My strongest traits to push through my aspirations is my confidence, passion, and hardwork.

Read More
839 Words | 4 Pages

This attitude is clearly naive. Walton possesses the same eagerness that destroyed victor and the monster. Victor says to Walton,

Read More
1420 Words | 6 Pages

ENG-3U0 November 20 2015 Frankenstein: The Pursuit of Knowledge Throughout the course of their individual journeys, Victor Frankenstein’s extreme passion for gaining knowledge about creating life, Robert Walton’s curiosity to discover land beyond the North Pole and the monster’s eagerness to obtain knowledge about humans was the principal cause of each of their suffering. As such, In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the pursuit of knowledge is a dangerous path which leads to suffering. Victor Frankenstein develops a keen interest in discovering knowledge about living beings which ultimately results in his personal suffering as well as others suffering. To begin with, Victor embarks on an assignment through combining body parts and following various

Read More
943 Words | 4 Pages

The Dangers of Knowledge Frankenstein, a novel written by Mary Shelley, is notoriously accredited for its development and implication of multiple themes. Set in the 1700’s, Frankenstein is a gothic fiction telling of isolation, knowledge, and nature. The biggest of these being knowledge and inevitably its consequences. With knowledge comes question; What poses the most danger? The knowledge itself, or the journey to gain information?

Read More

More about The Thirst For Knowledge In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Related Topics

Open Document