Literary Elements: Simile - Irony
Simile
Shelley uses simile on multiple occasions throughout the book. She does this to emphasize her points and really help the reader understand the significance of characters' feelings or the description of the setting.
No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me on-wards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead and found a passage to life, aided only by one glimmering and seemingly ineffectual light. When I would account to myself for the birth of that passion which afterwards ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources. The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home. |
Metaphor
Shelley also makes use of metaphors in Frankenstein.
One of these is that the monster is a metaphor for humanity, as humans are born pure, just like the monster was, and it wasn't until he was exposed to the torments of humanity that he became murderous. Victor is also a metaphor for God, as he is searching for ways to be divine and create life just as God creates life. Nature is a metaphor for healing throughout the play, which pushes along the idea that the monster is bad because he is unnatural. Shelley describes Victor's recovery from grave illnesses through his obsession with nature, as it is the breathing of the air that finally gives him strength. |
Hamartia
The entire story could be seen as only happening due to Victor's hamartia, or fatal flaw. His extreme pride and arrogance really decides what's going to happen to him, along with his insatiable thirst for knowledge. He strives to become the greatest scientist in the world, and in doing so he creates a monster which ultimately causes his demise and the demise of everybody he holds dear to him. While the monster is the direct cause of his demise, without his pride and arrogance the monster would've never been created in the first place, and everybody would still be alive.
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Invocation
An invocation is when a character asks for help from a deity, spirit, or the like. There is a major time when Victor does this, in chapter 10 he says "Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life." Essentially what he is saying is that if the spirits are going to kill him, he would rather have them do it now than later, before anything worse can happen to him. This is interesting because at this point in the story, his brother and Justine have just died so he believes it's as bad as it's going to get, when really it gets much worse for him in the rest of the book, so it would have been better if they had killed him then.
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Irony
There are many examples of irony in Frankenstein, with it being a major point in the story.
The first main example of irony is the fact that when creating the monster, Frankenstein intended to create life, he succeeded but it horribly backfired when his creation started taking lives of other people. Another example is when the monster tells Frankenstein that he will be with him on his wedding night. This makes it seem like he is going to kill Frankenstein on his wedding night, but instead he is actually with Elizabeth, strangling her. The amount of effort the monster puts into terrorizing Victor and destroying his life makes the reader believe he takes pleasure in doing so and does it for fun, yet at the end of the novel he states “For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires”. |