Darius Pouladian-Kari Alex Fairbanks-Ukropen ENGL 242: Section 308 20 April 2024 TITLE Everyone wants to be liked. It’s a common desire most people subscribe to, whether or not they realize it. In the pursuit of presenting oneself as likable, people will often unreliably relate information, experiences, and morals. Such is the case with Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein, who author Mary Shelley writes to be an intentionally unreliable narrator. This choice highlights Victor’s mental instability, selective memory, and lack of accountability to build the tension driving the plot, calls attention to alternate perspectives, and asks the reader to question Victor’s motives. Shelley first calls into question Victor’s reliability with his mental instability, often stemming …show more content…
He first imagines kissing Elizabeth, but soon realizes her lips turn to a “hue of death,” with Elizabeth now appearing like his “dead mother.” This choice by Shelley to draw on Victor’s traumatic past informs the reader that this event is still affecting him in the present. Victor’s mental state is shown to further deteriorate once he creates the monster, experiencing a hallucination that causes him to fall ill for many months. Victor even recognizes what he sees as a hallucination, saying, “I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit.” (Shelley 41) Although Victor is attempting to be honest with the reader here, sharing seemingly earnestly what he saw, he doesn’t make any effort to directly address these hallucinations and trauma. Instead, it continues to drive him, even after his whole family is gone. Victor becomes obsessed with killing the monster, losing all other worldly motivations and declaring, “What then became of me? I know not; I lost sensation, and chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me.” (Shelley 149) Shelley chose to write