Douglas Spivey
Compare and Contrast Essay
Honors English II
August 6, 2008
Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is an interesting and unique work of fiction. Two of the characters in this book are equally unique and interesting. Despite being two very different people, Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton are two extraordinarily similar characters. Victor Frankenstein’s life differs from Robert Walton’s in that his life was permeated with grief, pain, and rage, whereas Mr. Walton’s life is filled for the most part with happiness, though without much of a driving force behind it. Mr. Walton finds this driving force when he decides to embark on a journey to discover the North Pole. An interesting similarity between Mr. Walton and Dr. Frankenstein is that they are, for the most part, wholly friendless in the desolate arctic until they meet each other, and that both of them have quests that they have embarked upon, though they partake in these quests for different motivations and reasons.
Victor Frankenstein’s existence started out largely happy and carefree even to the point that he says, “No human being could have passed a happier childhood.”(23) This carefree existence continued until he met a professor who filled him with a desire to recreate life. He spent several months attempting to create life in which he robbed graves for body parts and put together a simulacrum body that he was going to attempt to fill with life. He succeeded in his attempt, though not the way he expected to. The body he had created was hideous to the degree that “its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes.”(80) Filled with disgust and horror over his creation, he fled. Much later, Frankenstein was met with tragedy after tragedy as his creation killed or caused the death of every member of his immediate family and friends due to its rage over how Frankenstein and humanity in general had treated it overall. Frankenstein...