How To Read Literature Like A Professor

Chapter 21: Marked for Greatness

• Scars on a character are meant to show the importance of it, describe his/her past, uniqueness and the mental state of the character. Harry Potter’s scar is all we ever think and talk about through the course of the books or movies. That scar makes him who he is. The lightning bolt shaped scar is on his forehead it is the result of a failed murder attempt by Voldemort on Harry with the Killing Curse when he was only 15 months old. He was the only person to survive the curse because his mother sacrificed herself for his protection. Similarly in Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, the creature had gruesome scars once he was created. He was abused by so many of the villagers when he naively came into the world as a clueless living thing. He was shown disgrace and disgust by the “fellow-creatures [human beings], who owe” him “nothing” as “they spurn and hate” him (Shelley 10). Due to that hatred, he was mentally and physically scarred for the rest of his life.

Chapter 22: He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know

• Sometimes being blind doesn’t literally mean one can’t see. Blind people can be the people who have sight, but are greedy and selfish. Few people can’t see what is right in front of them, instead he/she ignores the obvious fact and goes on about their own “concerns” or “desires”. Usually when the character is blind, not physically, but mentally, he/she loses complete sense of awareness to the surrounding, truth or emotion. Similarly in Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein was completely blind. When he blindly created the creature out of curiosity, he faced the consequences of his death of beloved family. Through this blindness of the creature, the author was foreshadowing how the creature “explains his anger” by declaring an “everlasting war against the species” and “against him who had formed” him “and sent” him “forth to this insupportable misery” (Shelley 15). the death of Victor’s family members. After finding out that creature was the one who killed all of his members, his only desire and ambition was to find and kill the creature, but how? He blindly chased the creature causing him to eventually die due to his poor health condition.