something i find really fascinating about walton is that walton is fundamentally someone who does not live in his own life so much as he lives adjacent to it, in the narrative projection of what he thinks that life should be.
like my dear friends @dykensteinery and @robertwaltons said, i don't think walton experiences life and the world the way a normal person does. it's not just that he's ambitious, or self-important, or even naïve, there's something externalized about how he processes his own existence. he doesn't live in his life, he observes it from outside, like he's writing his own biography in real time and already picturing how the sentences will land. there's this almost-need to see himself through the lens of a narrative, not as a person but a character, and it's like that framework is the only way he can give his life meaning. he’s not content just to live or love or fail like a person might; he has to achieve, he has to strive, he has to become. and it’s not enough to do the thing—he has to be seen Doing the thing. he has to be known, appreciated, immortalized.
he wants to be the kind of man who ends up in the polar expedition books he reads, but more than that, he wants to be worthy of the myth he’s built up in his head about what those men were. and he's very self-efficacious in this (“my first task is to assure my dear sister of my…increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking” “do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose”); he cannot allow himself to imagine that he might fall short of that.
take his crew's deaths for example. it's merely mentioned once, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line ("The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation"). despite being surrounded by the very men keeping his voyage afloat, who are risking their lives to realize HIS ambition, he barely mentions them. the sailor's deaths have no narrative weight. i used callous in the past to describe this tendency of walton's, and i think callous is, in hindsight, too strong of a word, but it does reveal something fundamental about how he orients himself toward others: walton is the protagonist of his own life in the most literal sense. he’s romanticized his ambition so thoroughly that everything around him becomes scenery, even people—they're just desolation to highlight the cold. they bolster the narrative of heroic striving that walton has cast himself in, which requires suffering. victor, obviously, is the exception to all this, which i touched upon here.
all of this doesnt really bring me to a single cohesive point other than i find this perspective really interesting. i just have walton brainworms lately. ok bye baii
