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"he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick. I could have torn him limb from limb, as the lion rends the antelope. But my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained."- Frankenstein
This passage evoked a lot of emotion in me. As I read it I felt as if I could feel his disappointment and pain when he realized that this was just another group of people to add to the list of humans that hate him for being abnormal. The only reason this evoked such strong emotion in me was because he was so excited and looking forward to having the family accept him after he learned French from them and provided them with wood, but they proved to be like everyone else who quickly judged him because he looked different from them. I actually thought that they were going to accept him. I thought that the blind man was going to stand up for him and explain to the rest of the family what the monster had said. I though he was finally going to be accepted by people who he held to a high esteem. When I read about how he threw himself at the old man to convince him to speak on his behalf and how Felix came in and started beating him, it made me see that no matter how sincere someone sounds, if they look a little different they will be judged. This relates to the incident of when he saved the girl from falling into the stream and the man who was accompanying her shot the monster even though he saved her life. The idea that bothers me from these two events is that instead of thanking him or at least listening to him and his perspective, they were quick to judge and violently attack him without taking into consideration who he is or what he feels. The fact that he is treated like this keeps boiling up under his skin until he ends up cracking and seeking revenge on the human range. I think that if at least one person, especially his creator, would show him mercy and just be sincerely nice, he would not have been as destructive as he was.
I found those parts to be moving as well, and they made me think: would I react the same way in that kind of situation? If I walked up and saw my friend, presumably just pulled from a river, being stood over by some ugly beast, would I wait to see if the monster actually means harm? Or would I just attack it? I think that it's our natural reaction in that kind of situation to go on the offensive. Is it better to eliminate a threat that turns out to be harmless than to hesitate and risk disaster (monster mushing your/your friend's face in)? I feel like we've been conditioned by society to interpret something like the monster as, well, a monster that means us harm. This lets us quickly decide that this foreign being is a threat and to attack it, even if in reality it means no harm.
ReplyDeleteI also was pained to see how the monster was mistreated and disrespected at these parts. Everyone was judging him by his appearance. And of course as readers we sympathize with him because we had a glimpse into his backstory of all of his struggles and obstacles that he was trying to work through on his journey towards self-identity and the human need for companionship. But at the same time I have to wonder. If we saw a man who looked like the monster in Frankenstein would we ourselves be as accepting?
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