Two Mad Scientists Trying to Play God
By Bonique Obermuller
ENG 4UO
Terry Pratchett once said, “God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players.” In the novels Frankenstein by Mary Shelly and The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells the characters Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau are scientists who take their experiments too far. Both Victor and Moreau are very smart men who want to experiment with nature. Victor is smart and curious. Victor wants to fight disease and discover the mysteries of nature. Moreau is a very ruthless barbaric man who does not take the feelings of others into consideration.…show more content… This shows that his morals are higher than Moreau, who is not bothered by the painful screams of the animals he experiments on and in fact revels in it because it makes him seem more godlike since he has the power to stop the pain but he does not instead, he chants: “His is the House of Pain; His is the Hand that makes; His is the Hand that wounds; His is the Hand that heals” (The Island of Doctor Moreau 118). He is arbitrarily inflicting pain on other living beings because he wants them to surpass their trivial bestial limitations; in doing this, he also is intentionally trying to break the bounds of his own human imitations by being an innovative god who can generate intellectual life from primal beings. Hence, contrary to Frankenstein, it is apparent that in Moreau’s morality he has no acknowledgement of the cold- blooded pain and suffering that he brings upon the creatures. From the beginning Frankenstein expresses his disgust the more goory parts of his experimentations but it is not shown that Moreau ever finds himself sickened or revolted by his experiments. Long after the narrator and protagonist, Edward Prendrick became his companion, Pendrick finds Moreau laboriously at work in his lab, torturing a she-puma. And even when he reaches his demise in the end at the hand of that she-puma, Moreau still isn’t in the least bit bothered by his actions. There are many times when Frankenstein expresses his sorrow about what he has done. There is a point in
