Frankenstein Half 1

 

    What immediately stuck out to me while reading Frankenstein, was the way depression and trauma over an extended period was illustrated as having an effect on Victor. The ramifications of his poor handling of these experiences are also thoroughly explored and can be identified over the course of the story.

Although he seems in a state of relative bliss with his family in his youth, even his earliest and most pleasant years appear to be viewed through a more melancholy lens. This is exasperated by the death of his mother which cause him to, intend of expressing himself to loved ones, become reclusive and hyper focus on his studies and his work. He didn’t do this due to lack of friends since he had his close friendships with Elizabeth and Henry, but instead he did this because he felt he could find more occurrences in his studies that make logical sense.

To elaborate on this, it can be noted that from an early age he always possessed an interest in the sciences as it seems to be regimented and if-then-else, in a way the death of his mother probably wasn’t likely to be processed as. Yet in some ways even the science he took as gospel begins to be debunked as evidenced by Krempe disproving alchemy to him and informing him that all his time has been wasted. Yet needing a fitting coping mechanism to use as a means of bypassing his emotions he allows Waldman to convince him to continue forward. This continues him further down the rabbit hole and eventually leads to the creation of his monster.

But as the depression Victor is fighting continues to wax or wane with his environment and his return to family and friends, the nihilism that Victor sees around him is now being paralleled by the monster’s experiences. In the case of Victor when he couldn’t make sense of the hardball problems life was throwing at him, he ran to science since it seemed it would be less temporary than the people around him and might even act as a method for him to put some pieces of his world back together. He just didn’t consider how science could be just as unpredictable or cruel as life is. This unpredictability then created the monster who learned to feel the same isolation, pain, sadness, and loss that he did.