Comparing and Contrasting Frankenstein and Waiting for the Barbarians - Essay Example

The magistrate tries his best to ignore and avoid an inevitable barbarian war. This paper seeks to compare and contrast various concepts and metaphors as used in the two novels. The concepts to be covered in this paper include femininity, the theme of man as an animal, the concept of nature, and various concepts of corruption. In waiting for the Barbarians and Frankenstein, femininity is viewed as passive and weak. In Frankenstein, the novel is riddled with female characters that are passive and suffer because of this.

There is not one female character who exhibits any behaviour that can be seen as outside the reactive and submissive female role. Victor’s love, Elizabeth is killed at the hands of the monster, which is male while she is waiting for victor to rescue her (Shelley 71). She is incapable of taking an action of saving herself without the help of a man. Justine is also killed because of a murder that was committed by the monster. While she comes across as a victim of circumstance, she is helpless to defend herself against the men.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, the magistrate is victimized as a barbarian by the empire because they deem him uncivilized from the patriarchal imperial authority perspective of authority and feminized men. The sole reason for the downfall of the magistrate comes from his innate sensitivity to animals and barbarians, which is viewed as a feminine attribute. This also leads him to be labelled as a barbarian-woman-animal (Coetzee 45), which legitimizes their treatment of him with contempt. Both novels also deal with the theme of man as an animal.

In Frankenstein, one could argue that the monster’s creator, Victor is himself a sort of animal or monster. This is because his ambition, selfishness, and secrecy alienate him from the society. While he seems ordinary from the outside, Victor may be the true monster or animal inside since he is consumed by a hatred for his creation. In waiting for the barbarians, the narrator describes the barbarians as actual animals. When the prisoners are brought back to town for the first time to be detained until the colonel comes, the men “stand watching them eat as though they are strange animals” (Coetzee 18).

They are kept in a locked in the yard where people come to look at the poor animals stripped of their habitat. They are described as having filthy habits and the kitchen staffs throws them food through the doorway as they were actually animals. The narrator also adopts a barbarian girl and describes their relationship as that between a man and a pet. The narrator even remarks, “People will say I kept two wild animals in my room, a fox and a girl” (Coetzee 34). Both novels also deal with the concept of nature.

In Frankenstein, Victor has a “fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature” (Shelley 47). This is because he is of the opinion that people do not know anything concerning the natural world. Via the study of science, Frankenstein hopes to aid humans. This is evident when he claims that he “enter[s] with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life, but the latter soon obtained [his] undivided attention” (Shelley 47). This philosopher’s stone apparently has the ability to transmute all metals to gold, while the elixir of life makes man immortal.

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