In Shelly’s novel, Victor Frankenstein learns how to “infuse a spark of being into lifeless things”. He uses this knowledge and creates a living thing. The creature is so hideous that “not even Dante could not have conceived”. From the moment he is animated, the wretched creature is an outcast. He is not human; he was not born to a mother or father, or was created by God. Throughout the novel several situations occur that allow the readers to see that the monster isn’t normal. In one instance he causes havoc in a village by simply appearing to the villagers.
But Shelley also allows us to see many of the “normal” characteristics the creature has. While observing the De Laceys, the monster learns how to speak and read. Shelley showed that nothing is normal. The creature at first was very different from the humans, but at the end he was the most human character in the novel. There was a major personality change in the creature. He at first had serene thoughts, and also never performed any bad deeds. For example, instead of eating animals, he ate nuts and berries. He thought they shouldn’t be harmed because they did nothing to him.
But later in the novel the creature learned to hate, a vice that differentiates humans from animals. An animal is not able to hate another, but a human can. At this instance we know the creature is normal because he acts like a human, thinks like a human, and feels like a human. In Shelly’s novel, Victor Frankenstein learns how to “infuse a spark of being into lifeless things”. He uses this knowledge and creates a living thing. The creature is so hideous that “not even Dante could not have conceived”. From the moment he is animated, the wretched creature is an outcast.
He is not human; he was not born to a mother or father, or was created by God. Throughout the novel several situations occur that allow the readers to see that the monster isn’t normal. In one instance he causes havoc in a village by simply appearing to the villagers. But Shelley also allows us to see many of the “normal” characteristics the creature has. While observing the De Laceys, the monster learns how to speak and read. Shelley showed that nothing is normal. The creature at first was very different from the humans, but at the end he was the most human character in the novel.
There was a major personality change in the creature. He at first had serene thoughts, and also never performed any bad deeds. For example, instead of eating animals, he ate nuts and berries. He thought they shouldn’t be harmed because they did nothing to him. But later in the novel the creature learned to hate, a vice that differentiates humans from animals. An animal is not able to hate another, but a human can. At this instance we know the creature is normal because he acts like a human, thinks like a human, and feels like a human.