Frankenstein

Camila Jofré G.
English Literatura III
April 12, 2011

Can ambition change who we are?

Ambition is the desire to possess power, wealth and fame, but it is not necessary to see ambition as something superficial. Ambition is also the desire of a person to achieve goals in his life, to improve and go further. Be an ambitious person represents the power of overcome situations in our life andbe able to enjoy it. Mary Shelley represents the ambition as something blind, because either of Victor and the monster have a real conscious of what would happen if the desire to have what they want would destroy or enrich them.
At the end, the ambition of Victor and the monster ends up destroying them.
Victor’s ambition is to give life to a being through science. This ambition starts whenVictor and his parents went to a party, and because of the weather they had to stay in that house. Is there where Victor found some works of Cornelius Agrippa:
“I opened it with apathy; the theory which he attempts to demonstrate and the wonderful facts which he relates soon changed this feeling into enthusiasm. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind….” (ch.2 p.34), and it starts in Victor thedesire of penetrate the secrets of nature and the elixir of life:
“I was left to struggle with a child’s blindness, added to a student’s thirst of knowledge. Under the guidance of my new preceptors I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life” (ch.2 p.36).
After a lecturing from M. Waldman, Victor become in his disciple and good friend.Victor started to learn chemistry and mathematic which help him in his scientific journey. With this knowledge and ambition he become selfish, during two years he did not visit his family because he was obsessed in achieve something interesting, “I paid no visit to Geneva, but was engaged, heart and soul, in the pursuit of some discoveries which I hoped to make.” (ch.4 p.50).
After that long timehe was attracted of the structure of the human being and decided to create one. What Victor did not know was that he will create a monster, but his ambition to create a human being blinded him completely to the point of haunting cemeteries. Finally in November his ambition and obsession become real: “His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! GreatGod!”(ch.5 p. 58).
Victor’s obsession isolated him from society, university studies, friends and especially from his family. After all, Victor’s ambition was complete, but he did not like the monster, so he rejected him, and that rejection produce in the monster something very bad.
The monster is also consider as a human being with feelings and doubts. It is true that the monster was created in alaboratory, but the fact that he was created with human body parts makes him a truly human being. Victor’s rejection produces in the monster an odd feeling, so he decided to go away and try to find care. For his fortune or misfortune, he found some letters from Victor to his family in his diary, so the monster goes to Geneva and take away all the care and love that Victor forgot for two long years. Atthis point, the pursuit of happiness becomes the ambition of the monster: “my heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy”.
The monster no only was rejected by his creator, who claimed that the monster is just a thing that does not deserve love and affection, but also from society. He was something ugly, made by dead parts of body from other people. It was difficult for him to findsomeone who takes care of him and vice versa.
The monster never gives up and he continues with his journey to Geneva to see Victor’s family. The monster find that it was a close family, who take care from each other, and see all of that produce in the monster an obsession to have those feeling and emotions.
The first victim of the monster was William, the youngest brother of Victor. The...