Quotation: Page 45 “In this house I chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agirppa…. My father looked carelessly at the titlepage….”

Comment/ Connection: Disregarding of Victor’s interest in the book sparked a need to know what was in the book that made it “sad trash”. This starts his interest in biology and his eventual experiments of reanimation. The way the quote shows how he got interest in this subject makes it seem like an act of rebellion or spite out of his father dismissing his interest in the book. This happens in real life too, although with more realistic and less “monstrous” things. I know I have done many things out of spite because I was dismissed so easily.

Later in the chapter he says he was turned away from the dark sciences but if that were truly the case there wouldn’t be much of a monster story.

This passage also makes me wonder if his father had gone over how the works of Cornelius Agirppa if he would have been able to see the horrors it could lead to. I wonder if his father would have said how repulsive and dangerous these ideas were. This also feels like the point that Victor’s search for knowledge starts to go down a darker path.

Question: It makes me wonder how many seemly small decisions we could make daily change the outcome of our lives. Say someone chose to stay home one day because they had a migraine that went away an hour or two after calling in? how would that affect them in a year? Would the sick day have been worth it? Do they need a sick day now for worse, more dire reasons? Say they didn’t take the sick day on the day of the migraine; would they still be destined to take a different unneeded day?  If everything can affect everything else, are there ever right decisions? And if our decisions always end up being contradictory is there any different outcome?