The way people become who they are has been argued for many years through the Nature vs. Nurture debate. Both sides have their merits, but in the end, it all comes down to your beliefs. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the theme of Nature vs. Nurture and how people learn important life lessons is very prominent all throughout the novel. She believes that who we are is learned from our environment, For example the learning process the Creature goes through, from a mere “child”, unable to speak and no knowledge of love or family, to a kind of adult who is capable of reading and holding a conversation, albeit with a bit of difficulty and able to discern right and wrong. This theme will be presented with the following topics: first of all, the monsters…show more content… More importantly, the way he learns life lessons is very similar in a way to the learning pattern of a child, although he does not have parental figures to help him out. For example, the creature learns about helping others and kindness by gathering food for the cottagers when he notices that they were very poor, and that the children would often starve themselves so that the old man would have more to eat. So he gathers food and stops stealing from them, “... I had been accustomed, during the night, to steal a part of their store for my own consumption, but when I found that in doing this I inflicted pain on the cottagers, I abstained…” He also realises that it took a lot of time for the youth to gather firewood, so he decides to do that during the night to help. Another example would be friendship and prejudice. The creature learns these two lessons when he first approaches the old man. Being blind, the old man could not judge the creature on his appearances therefore they start a sort of friendship. But it all goes bad when the old mans children come into the cottage and attacks the creature, thinking he is attacking the old