Victor Frankenstein Ambition Quotes

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings – Salvador Dali. This famous quote is a great example of ambition has been highly valued as a necessity for success, and that remains true today. However, the power of ambition should not be taken lightly. Ambition is a double-edged sword, it brings power to whoever wields it, good or bad. Italian philosopher Machiavelli watched as tyrants often used dirty and brutal tricks to gain power, which were judged as necessary. These reckless actions are typically viewed as immoral, and it is important not to disregard ambition’s darker side. The desire for discovery becomes problematic when the ambition to improve mankind’s quality of life becomes clouded by personal gain. Ridley Scott’s film Bladerunner

From the beginning, Victor fully intended the creature to have “many happy and excellent [nature] to owe their being to me”, with no foresight on his actual responsibility to his creation. He just wanted his creation to owe their life to him with no acknowledgment of his care and nurturing in return. However, soon after, Victor abandons the creature, realising that “No mortal could support the horror of that countenance” and that “it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived”. In this, Shelley has alluded to the poet Dante who wrote ‘The Divine Comedy’, a poem that describes the horrors of hell. This implies that Victor sees the creation as even more hellish than hell, which Shelley uses as a device to highlight his hypocrisy. Victor made the creature himself and abandoned it as a newborn because he made the creature ‘too ugly’ for anyone to support, including himself. This positions the reader to see Victor as selfish and cowardly, because of society’s knowledge of the importance of parents in a person’s life. Especially on how absent parents, severely impact a child’s upbringing. How many people do you know that have an absent parent? We feel for the creature as we know how important our parents are or have even experienced something similar to the creature.

The replicant Racheal is an excellent example of this. Tyrell aspires to create his replicants “more human than humans”. To do this, he plays God with Rachel’s life by experimenting and implanting false memories into her, so she believes that she is human. As a society, we often view the truth as the right thing to do no matter the circumstance. Lying alternatively warps a person’s knowledge of what reality is. Ultimately, lies break the trust people have between each other and in their relationships. Scott characterises Tyrell in this manner, so we are positioned to negatively view Tyrell as his egotistical ambition and God-complex beliefs prevent him from making moral decisions. This is further seen in how he calls Racheal as “only an experiment, nothing more”. Tyrell places the needs of his experiment, his ambition, above the wellbeing of Racheal, who is, functionally, human. The consequence of this is when Racheal does end up finding out from Deckard, she cries. The emotional impact this has on Racheal is emphasised by being a close-up shot of her face, placing emphasis on her emotions and capturing the intensity of the scene. Furthermore, an old, out-of-tune piano accompanies the scene which creates a sombre and melancholic mood. Scott utilises this combination to position us to empathise with Racheal as everyone at some point in our