Frankenstein: The Empathy of Victor Frankenstein Should the loss of empathy be justified by humanity's sins against you? Victor Frankenstein and his creature are tormented by humanity and become criminals; but does this necessarily mean that both were unable to retain their humanity. At the end of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein has lost most of his humanity. This is uniquely demonstrated by comparing him to his own creation, his monster. The unnatural creature conceived in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has an enormous amount of empathy, whereas its creator, Victor Frankenstein, has very little and has therefore lost touch with his humanity. At the end of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wanted the reader to discover that it was not Frankenstein. She was able to achieve this fully by emphasizing the absence of a single trait in Frankenstein; he has no empathy. Empathy, the ability to feel with another creature, is an integral part of what makes us human, what separates us from inanimate objects and animals. It is possible for a person to register the emotions of another creature without truly empathizing. True empathy requires an individual to merge their identities and act on both their own emotions and those of others. It is the lack of empathy that fuels human brutality. If an offender were truly capable of reading and identifying with the emotions of a victim, it would become impossible for him to act against that being. Victor sometimes claims to have had compassion for his monster, but was never able to act on it. After the monster begs Frankenstein for a mate. Frankenstein, "compassioned him and sometimes felt the desire to console him, but when [he] looked at him, when [he] saw the filthy mass which moved and spoke, [his] heart". Only revenge gave [him] strength and calm; it shaped [his] feelings and allowed [him] to be calculating and calm” (145). Victor has gained a new purpose and even on his deathbed he remains faithful to the principle that he is justified in desiring the death of his enemy. Moments before his death, he turned to Captain Robert Walton and said: “I feel justified in desiring the death of my adversary. During the last few days I have been busy examining my past conduct; and I don’t find that reprehensible” (156). He even begins to lose what little compassion he had for the creature's struggle. Visiting his family's graves, he exclaims: “They were dead and I lived; their murder also survived” (145). Earlier in the novel, he blamed himself for the deaths of Mathew, Justine, and Henry, claiming to be their murderer and lamenting the evil he had unleashed into the world. Victor now places the weight of these deaths solely on the monster's shoulders and believes that it is his God-given task to cleanse the world of this evil. He had been “assured that the shadows of [his] murdered friends had heard and approved [his] devotion… rage had suffocated him” (146). The death of the monster would not even weigh on his conscience since it belongs to God.