Complete paper

Adrian Batson
6/11/99
Frankenstein

A mind can be defined by the scope of the perspective it holds over the world it perceives. When a mind's overall perspective narrows, it is not only crippled by the following disconnect from reality, but permanently altered when the new paradigm sets root in the unused and wilting mental real estate left sadly abandoned. In the novel Frankenstein, the protagonist Victor Frankenstein experiences the agony of complete personal downfall through, and as a by-product of, his indulgence in a careless pursuit of ultimate knowledge.
Usually, great evil can be linked to traumatic childhood experiences. In the case of the mind’s corruption by obsessive intellectual pursuits, however, an ironically idyllic childhood is often requisite. Victor’s childhood is a generally happy one, peppered by the occasional loss of loved ones to be expected. With his vast intellect, he was magnetically drawn to the sciences, something he had an affinity for. A seemingly bright and endearing interest would later turn cancerous.
The path toward crippling intellectual tunnel vision is paved with good intentions. Victor’s quest for knowledge is ominously ambitious: he desires to discover the secret to life. A far-reaching and powerful sum of knowledge, it is undoubtedly one of the most difficult scientific problems to solve. Victor focuses relentlessly on the subject, and via his unique talents and capacities, achieves this knowledge. Though Victor has a grand, if slightly unsettling, vision of a new race of beautiful humans crafted by his own hand, his single mindedness suffocates his peripheral perception.
When one’s vision of reality is selective, logic loses it’s power. Logic is only as valid as the premises used to churn out the answer. Like putting the wrong numbers in a calculator, the device will give a “correct” answer, but not the one needed. Likewise, when Victor grows more deeply and intensely focused on his goal, he loses sight of his past life. This decay of self is a self-reinforcing feedback loop; he never grasps the damage he is doing to himself, his future and his family, and thus cannot logically react to it. Indeed, he is stuck in a fantasy world, cordoned off from reality.
Self-reinforcing loops are an important piece to this puzzle, and should be looked at a bit closer. Most people are in an equilibrium point, almost by definition; change happens quickly and suddenly usually, and corrects itself as soon as it can. In a negative feedback loop, behaviors deviating too much from the mean are corrected and brought back around an average. Only if one has a wide and crisp perspective on life, is this self-correcting stability healthy; all the facts are in and decisions are made as wisely as they can be. When this perception narrows, as in Victor’s case, the outside information that was positively necessary to keep he or she in check is mostly lost. As a result of his obsessive endeavor to create a life form from scratch, he slides swiftly down a slippery slope, away from his past equilibrium point. Only when he completes his creation does this downward spiral come to an abrupt halt.
The point in the novel when Victor at last finishes his creation demonstrates succinctly the brutal crash of an instantaneous (and involuntary) widening of perspective. His waking monster staring up at him becomes the unavoidable, living proof of his chronic folly up to that point. The quick shift to the old paradigm is an important aspect of the overall phenomenon, but doesn’t always need to be from such a sudden shock of an animate patchwork monster. Often the sacred values of the past self remain intact and untouched; lonely island rocks, slow to wear, in a black, churning sea. In Victor’s case, his friendship with Clerval, and more prominently, his romance with Elizabeth, is kept untainted and untouched despite the intense focus on his work. These hard-line connections to his former childhood self are his only life lines, seeds from which he can regrow his past life. It’s conceivable that, if the monster never killed his loved ones, he’d have been able to build a new life from the ashes.
Though one can grasp brief glimmers of the warmth of a complete self, it will never be what it was. “Use it or lose it” applies nicely to the mind’s functioning. Despite Victor’s obvious brilliance in one area, the loss of intellectual blood flow to the other important areas of his mind and life results in a mental atrophy. These unused tracts of mental real estate are often taken over by the obsession, rewritten, and lost forever. Only redemption of past errors and a healthy pursuit of the aforementioned life-lines can dig one out of the hole caused by the initially innocently and nearly inescapable addiction to dangerous knowledge.