About

He is a mad scientist who created a strange serum that allowed the dead to be brought back to life, at the cost of their humanity – often becoming violent zombies intent on murder and mayhem.. yet Herbert continually shows an obsession with overcoming the limits of life and death, thus continued to raise the dead despite the horrible consequences.

His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialized progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself.

He was convinced that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realized. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shown him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly skeptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case

Herbert could, arguably, be considered a villain but he is not necessarily an evil character - in fact he seems to lack any sort of moral alignment - to him the important thing in life seems to be conquering death itself and he doesn't care what he has to do in order to achieve such goals.

Herbert West, like many mad scientists, has also been tasked with defeating his own experiments on a few occasions - though his madness always seems to ensure he'll make another batch of monsters in the future.

This is his soul purpose in lie, it consumes all of his waking moments. This behavior was not always there, It was after one beautiful sunny day on the way back from church in Boston with his parents an younger sister when the 'obsession' with defeating death arose. He stopped to tie his shoe on the side walk as his father waited for him. His mother was carrying his little sister on her shoulders when her heel broke an the two of them fell into oncoming traffic. Struck dead by an oncoming bus, nothing more than a bloody smear on the pavement.

One could say that Herbert has always blamed himself, he should have died with them.