Mental Illness In Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s book, Frankenstein, proffers multiple meanings of the monster that can be drawn upon from the text depending on one’s perspective and analysis on the book. The book can be seen as a true story with a real monster who murdered Victor Frankenstein’s family for the monster’s want for revenge. However, this one side is only the surface of what the story is truly about. It only gives a one-dimensional view that everyone should be able to grasp from their first read of the book for personal enjoyment. Once someone ponders on the question “What if the monster is imaginary, a fictitious creature created by Victor or Walton?”, it opens a new world of what the monster truly means hidden behind the cover of just an ugly monster shunned …show more content…
These symptoms indicate that there might be some mental disorder in play that is “creating” the monster. After some research, I came to the conclusion that the mental disorder is most likely schizophrenia. Some of the symptoms of schizophrenia include: hallucinations, anxiety, depression, fear, and fatigue. Victor seems to have a majority, if not all, of these symptoms. He always had a mental breakdown consisted of a hallucination of the monster whenever he is isolated, most likely due to the anxiety, depression, fear, and fatigue he felt from creating the monster with very little rest, his fear of the monster, and his determination to eliminate his creation. However, Victor was the only one who saw the monster throughout his whole story except whatever the monster told him, leading to the conclusion that the monster is a hallucination only visible to Victor when he is isolated from other …show more content…
Previously, I established that Victor and the monster were one and the same person since the monster is imaginary and performed acts that point out Victor as the one who truly did them. As a “whole” Victor, Victor represents the good of knowledge through creating (yang), while the monster represents the bad of knowledge through destroying (yin). However once he gained that knowledge, he experienced the negative aspects of getting it, splitting himself into the monster and Victor. His schizophrenia created a hallucination of the monster that represented the negative side of gaining knowledge, while he remained pure and true as a creator, never destroying anything he had given life to. Since Victor may be in denial of accepting the monster as the same as him, it manifests into the monster he sees now, which only kills. Because Victor can’t come to agreement with what he truly is, he continually sees a monster as the fault for his flaws. However, they are the same person, balancing each other out like the yin and yang are supposed to do. They can’t exist without the other. Since positives always comes with negatives, the good of gaining knowledge, creating, comes with the bad of gaining knowledge,