How the Mighty Have Fallen

In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, both Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein believe that they will be one of the people to enrich mankind and achieve something no one else has before. They believe that they will be greater than great. It is this desire to be great that drives them to spend their time wholly in pursuit of notoriety. As a result, they have become loners and the pursuit of knowledge has become their only companion. In this way they are similar to Ozymandias, a character in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem. He is the self-declared “king of kings” and tells everyone to “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Just by this inscription on his statue, we can assume that Ozymandias is very arrogant and just like Walton and Frankenstein, wanted to be notorious and achieve something great that others could not possibly hope to achieve. However, the narrator describes the land around the statue of Ozymandias as “boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Ozymandias might have wanted to be the greatest, but by the desert surrounding his crumbling statue, he is long forgotten. Based on the fall of Ozymandias, I believe that Walton and Frankenstein’s notoriety will not last very long. They might be doing mankind a service by trying to better people’s lives, but they are doing it for selfish purposes. Ozymandias is sculpted with a “frown, And wrinkled lip” indicating that he was not a very pleasant man to be around and wanted to be notorious for his own personal gain. Consequently, I believe that since Walton and Frankenstein are devoting their time to be great for their own purposes, they will not achieve notoriety for very long, if at all.