Question

What is the main effect of the scene with the lightning strike on the reader?

1. It suggests the narrator has little understanding of the world.
2. It suggests the power of nature is beyond the control of the narrator
3. It suggests the shifting nature of the narrator's interests in science.
I think it might be 1 And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed.
Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early youth, I at once gave up my former occupations, set down natural history and all its progeny as a deformed and abortive creation, and entertained the greatest disdain for a would-be science which could never even step within the threshold of real knowledge. In this mood of mind I betook myself to the mathematics and the branches of study appertaining to that science as being built upon secure foundations, and so worthy of my consideration.

Answer 1

The correct answer is 2. It suggests the power of nature is beyond the control of the narrator

Indeed, this incident in the life of Victor Frankenstein occurred before his creation of the monster and it definitely foreshadows Victor’s future actions with very Gothic and Romantic imagery. The storm represents the havoc and destruction his experiment will bring upon him and his family and friends. The tree represents the collective society that will inevitably be affected by his actions. The thin ribbons of wood are symbolically like the body parts that he will gather and put together to create the fiend and he will do this with electricity.

The term “branches of study” evokes the destroyed branches of the tree and symbolizes Frankenstein’s per version of the branches of science he will use for his experiments. Because a storm is used, the atmosphere is very ominous and conveys the message the Victor Frankenstein will have the arrogance of pretending to control forces that are actually beyond his control.