Robert Walton: A Schizophrenic
...r, Margaret: I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine. You may deem me romantic, my dear sister, but I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as a capacious mind, who tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans. How would such a friend repair the faults of your poor brother! (5). Did Walton actually pick up Victor Frankenstein who was stranded on the ice, or was it really just all in his imagination? Victor told Walton his life story from the beginning and leading to his downfall because of the creation of the monster. As Victor told his story, Walton recorded his tale as letters to his sister Margaret. Another question thus arises, do the letters actually get sent, and if they do how are they sent if he’s on the ocean with no other human beings besides himself and his crew? The theory that Walton is schizophrenic could be supported with the idea that Victor doesn’t actually exist. Although Walton sees Victor and interacts and speaks to him, the crew might have not because this may be occurring in his mind all along. There isn’t proof if Victor exists because the readers don’t know whether or not Victor was really onboard, and in truth since Walton doesn’t converse with his crew, this shows Victor might not have been there all along. The novel doesn’t really point out the fact that Victor may have spoken to any of the crew, if none of the crew saw him, then Victor was never there. Although in the novel: Frankenstein, the crew had supposedly seen Victor and what may have been the creature, this could also be explained that all of this occurred in Walton’s mind. This is another portion of what Walton wrote in his letters to his sister about how the crew and him picked Victor up: In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck and found all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to someone in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we have seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog remained alive; but there was a human being within it whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. (10). In the mind of schizophrenic, such as Walton, he may think that all of these events are real and actually occurring,...