Frankenstein and the monster Essay

â€Å"How far should we feel pity for both Frankenstein and the monster? † Essay By looking carefully at the arguments both for and against feeling pity for Frankenstein and his monster, it is easy to see that we should feel much pity for both. The â€Å"monster† was brought to life on a dark night and thrown into unwittingly into the wide world; a world in which he was forced into solitude due to the neglect of his creator and the rejection of all who saw him. For the whole of his life he was spurned by all who lay eyes on his skin-deep ugliness because their judging minds could not see the person who lay beneath. According to the monster, as he tells Frankenstein whilst talking to him, â€Å"You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being†. All he wanted was a small amount of love and affection from anyone or anything. This shows he has some human feelings and makes the reader empathise with what Frankenstein’s monster has to cope with. The constant rejection the monster receives in the end drives him, the reader believes, to make the ultimate sacrifice, to stop the pain that tears through his body; he wanders off into the snow, where the reader thinks he commits suicide. This ends the suffering and enables him to rest easy for first time since his birth. Others may disagree and say that Frankenstein’s monster was created from the body parts of criminals and therefore could be nothing but evil himself. Using the murders he commits this point could perhaps be justified. The monster kills the completely innocent William and effectively kills Justine as well, by cruelly framing her for his murderous deed. As we find out in the monster’s story he now thought that â€Å"From hence forth, evil be thou my good. â€Å", showing him as nothing but wicked. Furthermore he later murders Frankenstein’s father, before utterly destroying Frankenstein’s last chance of happiness, killing his wife Elizabeth on their wedding night. Having had everything stolen from him, Frankenstein enters a state of despair, where the only thing he has to live for is the need to destroy his creation. The monster had done no good in his life, only ruined Frankenstein’s. Then in an act of running away from all he had done and giving up because the death of his creator gave him nothing else to live for, he took his own life. The conclusion you could then reach from everything he did, is that he therefore deserves no pity from anyone. Though these are completely valid points, there is a different way to look at it. The terrible things the monster did were brought on by the neglect and rejection he suffered, and not being allowed to have someone to love and care for. These are all things humans cannot deal with, making the reader feel more pity because of what he was driven to and the human needs and emotions he shows.