From the tortures of my own heart, I turned to contemplate the deep and voiceless grief of my Elizabeth. This also was my doing! And my father's woe, and the desolation of that late so smiling home all was the work of my thrice-accursed hands!
Chapter 8 · Victor Frankenstein
Context
After Justine's execution, Victor surveys the grief he has caused his family. He catalogs the suffering of Elizabeth and his father, and the destruction of their formerly happy home.
Analysis
The exclamatory fragments—'This also was my doing!' 'all was the work of my thrice-accursed hands!'—use theatrical syntax that draws attention to Victor's performance of remorse. The archaic intensifier 'thrice-accursed' and the metonymy of 'hands' (attributing agency to body parts rather than to himself as thinking agent) both belong to tragic rhetoric, positioning Victor as a cursed protagonist in a drama rather than a man who could still choose differently.
Essay Tip
Support a thesis that Victor narrates his life as a tragedy to evade ongoing moral agency—by casting himself in a genre where the protagonist is doomed, he frames his inaction as fate rather than choice, using literary form itself as an ethical evasion.