Italian Poetry Essay

‘Glide’ forwards this pertaining uncertainty as ‘glide’ means to move fast without effort. Hence this can be linked to the final chapters where Victor chases his creation that watches and leaves deliberate clues for him. Victor feels his presence but fails to locate him. This creates atmosphere because his paranoia follows him until death, gradually draining all his happiness. His manipulation of Victor can however be interpreted as being ‘justifiably’ evil. Readers often sympathise with him because Victor was his only connection to humanity in-terms of attention and fluent communication; hence why after Victor dies he instantly contemplates suicide in the same cold condition. Victor’s death would fate him to a life, if he chose to live, of eternal loneliness: [Chapter 24] â€Å"†¦ for the bitter story of remorse may not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever. † The creature felt the same way Victor did; he did kill and destroy innocence, but however is not the psychopathic monster which humanity perceived him to be. The novel ends with the creature’s final recital of his tendencies: â€Å"My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, will surely not think thus. Farwell,† during his life-time he had taken a cynical outlook of humanity and thus sees death as his only escape to ‘a place’ more accepting. A similar word which describes Victor’s psychological isolation is his seeking of ‘asylum’ at â€Å"the Church of Ingolstadt†. ‘Asylum’ follows a cruder pattern of ‘refuge’; being an ‘asylum’ is similar to being a ‘refuge’ but it’s to mean more alienated – a criminal would take ‘asylum’ in a church to avoid persecution at that time. It is his method of keeping sane as he feels ‘protected’ inside God’s house. This is significant because he, prior to this, had labelled the creature as a ‘daemon’ and ‘fiend’: both of which are evil spirits related to the devil thus Victor by seeking ‘asylum’ believes that he is safe from the creature because in Christianity such evil is void of entering the Church. However all the creature wants is companionship. He had been tolerant and justifiable in his reasoning to Victor before driving himself further to demolishing his happiness. Such justification is shown in Volume 2; Chapter 9: Did I request thee, Maker, from my day To mould me man? Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me? The monster through his intelligence learns to read and communicate in a profoundly persuasive manner. He quotes lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, paralleling his situation to that of Adam’s in Christianity. The creature is trying to show Victor that Adam may have been banished from all that was good in Paradise but even with such loss can still render happiness – merely because he has the one simple element to say alive for – love; which in comparison, the monster is deprived of. Therefore the monster, through his intelligence again, learns to deprive Victor of such love and companionship which will likewise inflict a profoundly negative effect on him. This is seen in Chapter 5 where he instantly recovers from his paranoia as he sees Henry: â€Å"In a moment forgot my horror and misfortune; I felt suddenly, and for the first time during many months, calm and serene joy. † Thus by the creature seizing away all his relations, he is seizing away elements of happiness which his life had contained. Hence this makes him pertain to his ‘wretchedly’ character which he had named himself. But Victor, however, knowingly shares similar emotion with his creation: â€Å"I passed the night wretchedly. † The verb which Victor uses to describe his action is ‘wretchedly’ which reflects his calling of the monster as a ‘wretch’. ‘Wretchedly’ is used to refer to someone who does an action in a deplorably unhappy manner; it is used in this context as a subtle form of foreshadowing of the trait of unhappiness he shares, and would continue to share in a fluent manner with his creation towards the end of the novel, especially during their mad endeavour towards the North Pole. The importance of friendships is further highlighted by the way he actually felt uneasy during his experiment; he was obsessed and did not genuinely enjoy what he was doing: â€Å"first time during many months† and he felt both ‘calm’ and ‘serene’ seeing Henry – such words indulge peace into one, which is contrasting with the whole experimental scenario. The significance of his creation is further emphasised, â€Å"The form of the monster whom I had bestowed existence was for ever before my eyes. † ‘For ever’ elaborates on the monster’s significance because it means for eternity, Victor will always seem him; ‘before my eyes’ is effective because it reinforces that Victor will feel the monster’s presence before or without seeing him. In Chapter 5, Victor describes the monster in a way which will inevitably repulse and frighten any human-being: â€Å"A mummy endued with animation could not be as hideous as that wretch†. The way Victor compares his creation to ‘a mummy endued with animation’ is striking, conjuring a beyond-frightful image of what the monster must look like. This image of the monster is further elaborated on in, â€Å"Oh! no mortal could support the horror of that countenance†; â€Å"it became a thing that even Dante could not have conceived. † The way Victor says ‘no mortal’ reinforces that no living thing, in this case human, could even bear to look at him – the inference to Dante emphasises how the creature has surpassed the human connotations of the word ‘hideous’. This is because Dante, especially his death mask, is one of the most controversially hideous architectural figures of History to people, both contemporarily and at that time. Dante had also written Italian Poetry (subsequently translated to other languages) which includes emotions which the monster felt such as Loneliness and exile in Paradiso. This puts an emphasis on the creature’s loneliness, showing how nothing prior to his creation had trodden upon this Earth, thus nothing currently resembles him – and without Victor’s help of creating him a partner – nothing ever will. He is lonely to a degree where he struggles to answer the most fundamental questions of identity and personal History.