Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818)

In the late eighteenth century, a twenty-eight-year-old British explorer, Robert Walton, sailing near St. Petersburg in pursuit of becoming the first man to reach the North Pole, encounters an emaciated European named Victor Frankenstein. Victor recounts the remarkable story of how he created a sentient being—and the catastrophic consequences that followed.

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The plot

The plot unfolds within a nested structure: the reader experiences the narrative as Robert Walton’s written record—sent in letters to his sister Margaret—of Victor Frankenstein’s oral account. Victor’s story can be divided into four acts.

The first recounts the events leading to the Creature’s conception.

The second describes the events following the Creature’s animation.

The third presents the Creature’s account of his experiences to Victor.

The fourth follows the events after their fateful encounter.

Act 1: the creation

Victor describes his idyllic childhood in Geneva and introduces his early companions. Apart from his parents and two younger siblings—his middle brother Ernest and the youngest, William—there are two key figures. Elizabeth Lavenza, an orphan of Italian nobility adopted by Victor’s mother, becomes the primary maternal figure for Ernest and William after Caroline Frankenstein dies. It is understood that Elizabeth will one day marry Victor. Henry Clerval, the son of a merchant and Victor’s dear friend, is—unlike the bookish Victor—consumed by romance, adventure, and heroism.

As an adolescent, Victor becomes fascinated by the works of medieval natural philosophers who studied what they believed were hidden forces in nature—alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects. At seventeen, after the death of his mother, he is sent to the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, in present-day Germany, where his teenage interests are rekindled with renewed fervor.

At the university, Victor discovers the principle by which life can be generated and resolves to bestow animation on lifeless matter. He gathers materials from graves, dissecting rooms, and slaughterhouses, eventually assembling a human figure eight feet in height. After two years, on a bleak winter night of November, the Creature comes to life. Although Victor had carefully chosen what he believed were beautiful features, the Creature appears grotesque.

Act 2: the revenge

Horrified by what he has done, Victor rushes out of his apartment. After wandering aimlessly for some time, he returns and is relieved to find the Creature gone. He soon falls ill and is confined to bed for several months, during which Henry Clerval nurses him back to health.

Nearly a year and a half after the terrifying event, Victor receives a letter from his father announcing that William has been murdered. The family had been walking in Plainpalais—a meadow outside the gates of Geneva—when the boy disappeared; he was found the next morning, strangled, with marks on his neck.

By the time Victor arrives, the gates of Geneva are closed for the night, and he spends the evening in the nearby village of Secheron, about two miles away. Unable to resist visiting the site of the murder, he rents a boat and crosses to Plainpalais. After alighting and walking toward the meadow, a flash of lightning illuminates the gigantic form of the Creature near the base of the mountains bordering Plainpalais. Victor is convinced he has seen the murderer.

On reaching home, Victor learns that Justine Moritz—a young woman whom Caroline Frankenstein had brought into the household after witnessing the twelve-year-old being mistreated at home—has been arrested for William’s murder. A servant found the missing miniature that William had worn on the night of the murder in the pocket of Justine's dress, and her confused behavior under questioning deepens suspicion against her. The girl is executed after giving a coerced confession.

Act 3: the Creature's narrative

To distract himself, Victor travels to the French Alps. There, on a glacier near the majestic Mont Blanc, the Creature approaches him and recounts his story, insisting that he was once benevolent and became a fiend only through misery and rejection.

After coming to life, the Creature wanders through the forests near Ingolstadt, gradually learning to interpret his senses and survive in nature—discovering food, fire, and shelter as he slowly gains awareness of the world. When he enters a village, terrified inhabitants drive him away, forcing him to hide in a wooden shack beside a cottage, where he begins to live unnoticed.

From the shack, he observes the cottage’s inhabitants through a small crevice: an elderly blind man, De Lacey, and his children, Felix and Agatha. The Creature learns that the De Lacey family—once a respected and wealthy French household—fell into exile after Felix helped a Turkish merchant unjustly condemned in Paris escape from prison. When the authorities discovered the rescue, the De Laceys lost their fortune and were banished from France, eventually settling in the German cottage where the Creature found them.

Though the merchant had promised Felix his daughter Safie’s hand in marriage, he secretly despised the idea of her marrying a Christian and later fled with her after betraying Felix. Safie, however, refused to return to Turkey with her father and instead sought out the De Lacey family in Germany, restoring Felix’s happiness.

By observing the De Laceys from his shack, the Creature learns far more than the family’s history. He masters speech and language, learns to read, begins to understand the structure of human society, and develops a sensitivity to emotions such as love, loyalty, and generosity. He clings to the hope that the De Laceys, whose virtues he reveres, might accept him despite his deformity if they understand his gentle intentions.

At the very moment he finally reveals himself to the blind old man, the rest of the family returns. Agatha faints, Safie flees, and Felix violently attacks him, tearing him away from the old man and beating him with a stick. The De Laceys leave the area permanently in terror. By this time the Creature has also learned the details of his creation from Victor’s journal, which he had inadvertently picked up when leaving Victor's apartment. Filled with humiliation and rage, he turns his hatred toward his creator. He then sets out for Geneva, murdering William and framing the sleeping Justine by placing the miniature the boy carried on her person.

The Creature concludes his tale by demanding that Victor create a female companion—one as deformed as himself—insisting that only such a being can relieve his loneliness and prevent him from becoming humanity’s relentless enemy. Victor decides that he owes his creation some measure of justice and consents, on the condition that the pair depart for the wilds of South America once the companion is brought to life.

Act 4: the fatal chase

Victor procrastinates on his commitment to create a female companion. Believing the Creature will follow him to claim his companion once completed, he resolves to finish it far from his loved ones. He embarks on a months-long journey through Europe and England to Scotland, accompanied by Henry Clerval.

In Scotland, Victor persuades Clerval to remain on the mainland while he travels alone to one of the remotest Orkney islands. There, in a dilapidated hut, he begins the second creation. Unlike before, when he was driven by feverish ambition, he is now plagued by dark forebodings. When he sees the Creature watching from the window in eager anticipation, Victor destroys the nearly completed female. Enraged, the Creature vows revenge and warns Victor that he will be with him on his wedding night.

That night Victor rows out to sea and disposes of the unfinished female's remains, but drifting winds carry him to a distant shore off the coast of Ireland. There, villagers bring him before a magistrate to answer for the murder of a gentleman whose body had been discovered near the shore the previous night. The dead man turns out to be Henry Clerval, and the telltale marks of strangulation leave Victor in no doubt about the perpetrator.

Victor is eventually exonerated when his presence in the Orkneys at the time of the murder is confirmed. He returns to Geneva and marries Elizabeth. After the wedding, the couple set out by boat across Lake Geneva toward Villa Lavenza—a lakeside property in Italy that had once belonged to Elizabeth’s family and had been restored to her by the government. On the way, they stop for the night at an inn, where the Creature strangles Elizabeth, just as he had William and Henry.

Victor swears revenge and pursues the Creature for years, guided by sightings and taunting clues the Creature deliberately left behind. The chase eventually leads him to the frozen ocean near Archangel, where he follows his quarry on a dog-driven sledge. A violent storm splits the ice, leaving him stranded—until he is rescued by Walton.

Victor dies aboard Walton’s ship. On the night of his death, the Creature appears beside Victor’s body and expresses remorse to Walton. After bidding farewell, he departs the ship on an ice raft, drifting toward the northern wilderness. He vows to end his life on a funeral pyre and disappears into the darkness as Walton watches.

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Observations

The stages of becoming

Mary Shelley’s account of the Creature’s rapid transition from “infancy” to “adulthood,” accomplished in less than two years, traces the three-stage progression of human learning: instinct, observation, and deliberation.

Instincts are the inborn tendencies that guide behavior without prior instruction. Observation follows: learning acquired by watching the actions of others, even before their underlying logic is understood. Finally comes deliberation, the stage at which the mind actively engages with experience—reflecting, reasoning, and drawing meaning from what has been observed. The Creature’s development follows this arc.

Immediately after coming to life, the Creature is overwhelmed by the stimuli of light, sound, smell, hunger, drowsiness, and cold. Gradually he learns to distinguish among these sensations and respond to them. Without instruction, he knows that berries satisfy hunger, water from the brook quenches thirst, the shade of a tree offers relief from oppressive heat, clothes protects from the cold and sleep remedies drowsiness. These are the basic evolutionary instincts with which humans—and indeed all animals—are born.

The role of instinct extends beyond physical needs to encompass higher-order emotions and feelings unique to the human nervous system. The Creature makes subjective distinctions between sensations, such as the harsh note of the sparrow and the pleasant song of the blackbird. Later, he feels empathy for the joys and sorrows of the De Lacey family without any moral guidance. Moved by their hardship, he stops stealing their provisions and survives instead on forest food. He secretly gathers firewood at night to ease Felix’s labor, delighting in their surprise at the unexplained assistance.

A second set of learnings arises from observation and experimentation. He discovers a fire left by beggars and delights in its warmth. He infers that the raw material used for the fire—wood, was plentiful in the forest. Through observation, he learns that fire provides heat and light and improves certain foods (nuts and roots but not berries), yet burns when touched. Possessing of human intellect, he is able to wonder at the paradox of fire being both a friend and foe. Another bitter lesson follows: human beings are hostile.

During his confinement in the shack he discovers that the family communicates through articulate language. By listening carefully over many months, he learns the names of common objects and of the cottagers themselves—Felix, Agatha, and their father. He also begins to grasp abstract words such as “good,” “dearest,” and “unhappy,” taking great pleasure in acquiring speech.

The Creature also experiences shame upon seeing his reflection in the pool. Conceived with a human intellect, he possesses mirror self-recognition. Yet shame is learned—from the hostility he encounters and from comparing his features with those of others.

Finally, the Creature develops through deliberative learning. Animal knowledges sits mostly in their instinct with some learning from observation. It is deliberative learning that is unique to humans.

As Felix teaches Safie to speak and read, the Creature follows attentively, mastering spoken language more rapidly than Safie, perhaps because his mind is not encumbered by another language. He then learns letters and reading. The book used for instruction is Ruins of Empires, through which he acquires knowledge of history, nations, religion, war, and human society. He encounters both humanity’s virtues and its cruelty, weeping at accounts of injustice and violence. Through these lessons, he comes to understand social structures—wealth, rank, property, and inequality. He also discovers three books—Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, andThe Sorrows of Werter—in a leather portmanteau that profoundly shape his thoughts.

The narration of the Creature's development through the three stages serves to highlight seven insights into the human condition.

One, empathy is intrinsic to us. The Creature did not require any parental or religious instruction to recognize that "stealing" the De Lacey family's food is wrong or selfless unacknowledged acts like chopping wood for them brings joy. Language aids understanding, but human emotions can be grasped even in its absence. The Creature is overwhelmed with emotions when witnessing the interactions of the De Lacey family even at the time where he does not know any words.

Two, related to the previous observation, is the more controversial conclusion that evil is an acquired characteristic. Standing by Victor's body, the Creature insists to Walton that he suffered more in committing his crimes than his victims did in enduring them, describing how envy, rejection, and loneliness drove him to vengeance. For most people, the degree of grace they are willing to confer depends on the gravity of the infraction and the severity of the suffering. In the Creature's case, both are quite extreme.

Three, the nature of human desire is, as Rene Girard said, mimetic. Observation of platonic and romantic love within the De Lacey cottage intensifies the Creature's sense of deprivation.

Four, isolation is the deepest cruelty for a profoundly social species like human beings. It is for this reason that many people consider solitary confinement even worse than the death penalty. The Creature is engineered to be alone without any biological family and a physical form that repels others.

Five, man's deepest need is acceptance. We are all insecure about some shortcoming, whether real or imagined and our closest bonds are with those whom we trust not to judge us. The Creature desperately longs to be with the De Lacey family and hopes that he can compensate for his deformity with erudition and gentleness. Their revulsion on finally seeing him breaks his heart and sets him on a path of crime.

Six, nature is not merely a backdrop but a force that reflects—and at times reshapes—human emotion. The Creature first experiences “pleasure” when he is comforted by the “gentle light over the heavens.” The moon becomes a surrogate for the maternal care he lacks, soothing his confusion and his distress in the cold.

Later, while hiding in the hovel by the De Laceys, he witnesses the passage from a harsh winter to a vibrant spring. He recalls, “the past was blotted from my memory, the present was tranquil, and the future gilded by bright rays of hope and anticipations of joy.” As spring kindles hope, the return of cold synchronizes with his descent into vengeance after the De Laceys reject him. His account of the environment—“Nature decayed around me, and the sun became heatless; rain and snow poured around me; mighty rivers were frozen; the surface of the earth was hard and chill”—mirrors his inner state, where “all within me was turned to gall and bitterness.”

Seven, the appreciation of music arises from a more basic, perhaps innate, layer of human experience. Within the first few days of his existence, the Creature distinguishes between sounds: the sparrow “uttered none but harsh notes,” while those of the blackbird and thrush were “sweet and enticing.” His first encounter with artificial music comes when he secretly observes the blind De Lacey playing a stringed instrument; to him, the sounds are “sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale.”

The most tragic aspect of the Creature’s relationship with music is that it lures him into a false sense of security. The old man’s mournful guitar creates an atmosphere of harmony that emboldens the Creature to step forward and reveal himself.

The burden of awakening

The creation story at the heart of Frankenstein parallels the Biblical one: Victor assumes the role of God, and the Creature that of Adam. Four differences, however, stand out.

First, while God fashions Adam from the “dust of the ground,” Victor assembles his creation from far less savory matter, drawn from charnel-houses and dissecting rooms.

Second, the Biblical narrative turns on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden after they eat the forbidden fruit. Though tempted by the serpent, they bear responsibility for their fall. The Creature, by contrast, is not fashioned in innocence but brought into a world already fallen; like the rest of us, he inherits a condition he did not choose.

Third, like Adam, the Creature initially stands alone, unconnected to any other human being. His only bond is with his creator. Yet, while God loves His creation, Victor recoils from his, abandoning it at the moment of animation.

Fourth, in the Biblical account, God creates Eve from Adam’s rib while he sleeps so that he may not be alone. Victor, however, refuses the Creature’s plea for a companion, condemning him to perpetual isolation.

Despite these differences, the two stories converge on a central idea: knowledge and suffering arise together.

In the Biblical account, the acquisition of knowledge follows the eating of the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve become conscious of their nakedness, feel shame, and lose innocence. Their punishment is expulsion from Eden and a life of toil, pain, and mortality.

A parallel appears in the myth of Prometheus, invoked by the novel’s subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. By stealing fire from Zeus and giving it to humanity, Prometheus enables progress in knowledge and civilization. In retaliation, Zeus sends Pandora, whose opened jar releases suffering, disease, and hardship into the world. As in the Biblical story, knowledge and power usher in suffering. The Creature’s discovery of fire in the forests of Ingolstadt evokes this myth and reinforces his humanity, since fire—controlled and sustained—is a uniquely human tool.

The motif linking knowledge with suffering recurs in the Creature’s coming of age. The experiences that foster his intellectual growth—eavesdropping on the De Laceys, reading books found serendipitously in a portmanteau, and discovering the story of his own creation—serve as his forbidden fruit.

Exposure to sophisticated ideas has two antipodal effects. On the one hand, it brings the exhilaration that knowledge affords a naturally curious mind. On the other, it deepens his shame and misery as he measures himself against the standards of human society. He recognizes that he possesses none of the qualities humans esteem: no lineage, no wealth, no family—and a hideous form unlike any human being.

After their awakening, Adam and Eve perceive their nakedness and cover themselves with fig leaves. It is thus fitting that the Creature’s portmanteau supplies him with clothes.

The three stories—Biblical creation, Prometheus, and Frankenstein—allegorically anticipate Schopenhauer’s conclusion that knowledge and suffering are positively correlated. The German philosopher argues that the roots of pleasure and pain are the same for animals and humans: health, food, shelter, and sexual gratification. Having them brings pleasure; absence brings pain. Yet the human nervous system amplifies these states. An animal flees death instinctively; lacking an intellectual grasp of it, it does not suffer by anticipating it. A child cries when denied ice cream but suffers when he is old enough to understand that his parents cannot afford it.

Before their awakening, Adam and Eve inhabit a similar, animal-like state of unreflective existence. They do not judge the world; they simply belong to it. The Creature undergoes an analogous transition. Before acquiring higher-order knowledge, he perceives human hostility without fully comprehending it. Only when he understands its cause does he experience shame, resentment, and sadness. As he observes, “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.”

Ironically, Victor himself becomes a victim of knowledge. Had he not discovered the secret of life, he might have been spared the tragedies. As he ruefully tells Walton, “how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

The Big Question

The most compelling segment of the story is the Creature’s speech. Its crux is captured in his lament: “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?” He echoes Milton’s Adam, who bitterly questions God for creating him without consent, only to condemn him to suffer after the Fall. Adam asks:

“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me Man, did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me?”

This is the novel’s central inquiry: what is the purpose of birth when suffering is so pervasive? When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, life was, as Thomas Hobbes observed in 1651, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Consider Shelley’s own life: her mother died days after childbirth, and only one of her four children survived to adulthood—a pattern not uncommon in the early nineteenth century. The Creature’s question, then, would have carried a more visceral force than it does today.

Life, for most people today, is a mixture of ups and downs. As the Gumpism goes, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” For the fortunate, life’s torments are a price worth paying for its joys. The grief of losing a parent is tempered by gratitude for having known that love. As C. S. Lewis writes after the death of his wife, “The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.”

But for those whose lives are overwhelmingly marked by suffering, the Creature’s question remains a piquant one.

There are two ways to interpret the Creature’s jeremiad: as a dialogue between man and God, and as one between man and parent.

Viewed as a dialogue with God, the Creature’s question becomes philosophical: why would a benevolent, omnipotent God permit a life of relentless misery? Religious traditions offer two broad responses.

The first invokes some variant of karma. In the case of Adam and Eve, not only they but all humanity bears the consequences of their actions. More broadly, the Bible states, “A man reaps what he sows.” Yet this raises an obvious difficulty: innocents suffer, while the wicked often prosper.

The Bible addresses this apparent cruelty by positing a post-death future that is more just than life on earth. For the innocent, God will “wipe every tear from their eyes,” and “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.” For the wicked, there is a final reckoning after death. Buddhism approaches the same asymmetry through reincarnation: the deeds of one life are rewarded or punished in another.

The second religious response is essentially "do not ask questions beyond your pay grade". In the Bible, Job—a righteous man—is tested: he loses everything yet refuses to abandon his faith, even as he questions its cause. In the end, God answers not with explanation but with a reminder that human beings cannot fully comprehend divine wisdom, and Job’s fortunes are restored. The Buddha, who speaks extensively about escaping the cycle of birth and death, likewise does not explain what initiates each soul’s first fall from grace.

Since most of us will not speak to God and live to tell the tale, we might as well take Schopenhauer's advice:

"As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way."

The exchange between the Creature and Victor can also be read as one between child and parent rather than man and God. In this view, the Creature is simply a child asking his parents why they chose to bring him into the world.

Proponents of the eugenics movement have historically enforced sterilization on thousands. In the infamous Buck v. Bell (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law permitting the sterilization of those deemed “feebleminded.” Ruling against Carrie Buck, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” It is troubling for third parties to pronounce on the reproductive choices of others. Yet a child born into extreme poverty or a war-torn country is justified in questioning the reproductive choice of his parents.

The tomb of the eleventh-century philosopher-poet Al Ma’arri in Syria bears an epitaph he chose: “This is my father’s crime against me, which I myself committed against none.” His existential melancholy may have stemmed from the blindness he suffered after contracting smallpox at four. Though he lived into his eighties and enjoyed material prosperity, his refusal to have children was atypical for his time.

Yet most people, however unhappy, do not blame their parents for bringing them into existence, though they may resent aspects of their upbringing. For one thing, “nothingness” lies beyond human comprehension. For another, attachment to life is instinctive in any sentient being. Even a man on his way to jump from a bridge might run for cover if he hears gunshots. As the Creature tells Victor, “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

The Modern Prometheus

Depending on one’s perspective, Victor is either God or a human parent. Yet the subtitle The Modern Prometheus suggests that Mary Shelley sees him as neither. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan—a lesser divinity than Olympians such as Zeus or Apollo.

There is a fundamental difference between the Biblical God and Prometheus. God creates man in His image to be a responsible steward of the Earth, endowing Adam with reason, moral conscience, free will, and Eve’s companionship. If reason represents the material dimension of human life, God attends to both worldly and higher-order needs.

Prometheus, by contrast, attends only to humanity’s material needs. Beyond stealing fire, he tricks Zeus into accepting the bones of animal sacrifices, allowing humans to keep the choicest meat. He does not reflect on the consequences of granting such potent power. Indeed, cooking—the fusion of Prometheus’s two gifts, fire and meat—has been identified by the British anthropologist Richard Wrangham as a transformative force in human evolution, enabling the growth of the brain.

Victor, like Prometheus, "steals" a potent power—the biological secret of life—without reflecting on the moral and emotional elements that constitute humanness. Prometheus’s theft of fire is a political act of defiance against Zeus; Victor, by creating life outside Adam’s lineage, defies the Biblical God. As punishment, Prometheus is bound to a rock, where an eagle devours his liver each day, only for it to regenerate and be consumed again. The Creature is that eagle, returning again and again to torment Victor.

Shelley may be extending the title Modern Prometheus to scientists more broadly. By the early nineteenth century, science had begun to unsettle religious worldviews that had endured for millennia.

By the mid-seventeenth century, the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler had shown that the Earth is not the center of the universe, displacing humanity from the metaphorical center of God’s attention. If the Earth is merely one planet among many, the Biblical narrative of a world created as a fixed stage for human salvation begins to seem less plausible.

In 1687, Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, setting out the mathematical laws of motion and gravitation. A universe governed by predictable laws sits uneasily with the idea of Providence—the belief that God intervenes in daily affairs or performs miracles that suspend natural law. At most, God is a clockmaker who winds the mechanism and withdraws.

In the eighteenth century, the geologist James Hutton introduced the concept of Deep Time—the idea that the Earth is millions, even billions, of years old. This challenged the Ussher chronology, in which James Ussher dated creation to the night preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC by summing Biblical genealogies (e.g., “Adam lived 130 years and begat Seth…”).

For a casual observer in Shelley’s time, science could appear as a war on religion. If God designed nature’s laws, then scientists might seem like “thieves,” stealing His trade secrets—the analogue of Prometheus’s fire. Frankenstein reflects anxiety about the consequences of playing with such metaphorical fire. It is often read as a cautionary tale about ethically fraught pursuits—cloning, lethal technologies, even the search for extraterrestrial life.

People of Shelley’s era had to endure the discomfiture of scientific discovery overturning long-held beliefs, without yet enjoying the gains in lifespan and living standards that modernity would later bring. Had the scientific method saved her children, Shelley might have taken a more sanguine view of the “Modern Prometheus.”

The creator's debt

The most poignant moment in the novel is the Creature’s entreaty to Victor: “I ought to be thy Adam.” God’s relationship with Adam is one of tough love. Though He expels and punishes him, the faculties He bestows—reason, moral awareness, language (evident in his naming of animals), and the capacity for work and stewardship—equip Adam to endure the vicissitudes of mortal life. The Creature, by contrast, is abandoned to fend for himself.

The Creature’s request for a companion is shaped by his reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost. There, Adam tells Raphael how he felt lonely among the animals and asked God for an equal companion. In response, God creates Eve from Adam’s rib as he sleeps. In the Bible, however—unlike Milton’s imaginative embellishment—it is not Adam’s supplication but God’s own recognition that “it is not good for man to be alone” that leads to Eve’s creation. The Creature, having read only Milton, takes it as truth: “I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.”

Brooding on his condition, the Creature’s identification shifts from Milton’s Adam to Satan, cast by God from heaven into hell. In Milton’s narrative, Satan falls for refusing to accept Heaven’s hierarchy. The Creature, by contrast, has committed no such infraction, yet he too is expelled—from the “Eden” of the De Lacey cottage. Hence his lament: “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

The Creature’s hatred for Victor is a form of unrequited love—an obsessive, wounded attachment to the only being with whom he can claim any connection. While his actions are heinous, they resemble those of a child who plays truant to provoke attention from neglectful parents. He does not kill his creator even after Victor refuses to make him a companion; instead, his crimes are calculated to draw Victor’s notice. After Victor’s death, the Creature is truly alone and loses any sense of purpose.

This isolation recalls the prehistoric sea creature in Ray Bradbury’s short story The Fog Horn. Drawn by the deep call of a lighthouse fog horn, it rises from the depths, answering with its own cries in the hope of finding companionship after ages of solitude. When one of the watchmen silences the horn to test this attraction, the creature, deprived of the sound, turns enraged and destroys the lighthouse.

The two men

The relationship between Walton and Frankenstein is as captivating as that between the Creature and his creator.

Mary Shelley establishes the novel’s bleak tone in its opening line. Walton, writing to his sister in London from the freezing, desolate environs of St. Petersburg, begins: “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”

The enterprise in question is Walton’s consuming desire to reach the “country of eternal light”—the North Pole, which he mistakenly imagines to be an island:

What the North Pole is to Walton, the “secret of life” is to Victor—the all-consuming purpose of their lives.

The parallels between their monomania are striking. Both trace their obsessions to childhood reading: Walton to tales of historic voyages in his uncle’s library, Victor to the works of proto-scientific practitioners. Both endure severe physical hardship in pursuit of their goals. Walton, away from home for six years, “endured cold, famine, thirst, and want of sleep.” Victor neglects family and correspondence, ignores the beauty of the seasons, and withdraws from society; his health declines—fevered and agitated—yet he persists with single-minded resolve.

Providence, interestingly, offers both men opportunity of release. Exposure to the poetry of Homer and Shakespeare briefly diverts Walton, who attempts—unsuccessfully—to make a living as a poet. Though disappointed, an inheritance frees him from necessity and allows him to return to his earlier fixation.

At fifteen, Victor encounters a visiting natural philosopher whose explanations of electricity and galvanism discredit alchemy in his mind. Like Walton, he temporarily abandons his earlier interests and turns to mathematics, only to be drawn back into the vortex.

Both men are driven by visions of glory. Walton seeks to be the first to reach the North Pole, or at least to discover a new sea route towards it. Victor begins with intellectual curiosity—a desire to uncover the mystery of how consciousness arises—but, once he succeeds, imagines himself the progenitor of a new species, one that will bless him as its creator. He fantasizes that he may be able to restore the dead.

Walton is especially inspired by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The poem recounts the story of a mariner who impulsively kills an albatross, triggering a chain of macabre events. His ship is stranded, without wind or tide, and the crew, tormented by thirst—“Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink”—blames him for their misfortune, hanging the dead albatross around his neck.

Soon after, two figures—Death and Life-in-Death—arrive on a spectral ship and cast dice for the crew. Life-in-Death claims the mariner; Death claims his two hundred companions, whose corpses stare at him accusingly and even walk around like zombies. Eventually rescued, the mariner confesses his sin to a hermit. The catharsis of confession compels him to wander the earth, retelling his story.

Walton’s citation of the poem  as an inspiration suggests that his ambition is driven not only by the pursuit of glory but by a deeper imaginative yearning. He sees in the mariner—who gains no worldly advantage from his voyage—a kindred spirit. The mariner embodies the “tortured hero” archetype that flatters Walton’s exalted self-image. His letters to his sister blend affected modesty, self-pity, and a certain superciliousness. He laments his lack of friends, yet in truth finds no one worthy of his confidence. In Victor, at last, he discovers a mind attuned to his own.

Beyond serving as Walton’s inspiration, the poem parallels Frankenstein in several ways.

First, like the poem, Frankenstein has two narrators: Walton is the equivalent of the wedding guest who listens to the mariner's story and Victor is the mariner.

Second, the mariner tells his story to those he instinctively feels must hear it. Walton, similarly, is the ideal recipient of Victor’s cautionary account.

Third, both narratives unfold against the desolation of a frozen sea: the mariner’s becalmed ocean finds its echo in the icy expanse that traps Walton and Victor.

Fourth, the Creature can be seen as the albatross hanging around Victor’s neck. Yet he also resembles the spirit of Life-in-Death that claims the mariner—quite literally a being animated by life force fused into dead matter.

Finally, there is an irony in the contrast of their conclusions. The mariner ends with the moral that God loves all His creation, and that we should do the same. Victor, by contrast, is unable to summon any love for his creation from the moment it comes into being.

Frankenstein, like Walton, is drawn to the fantastical. Professor Krempe’s contemptuous dismissal of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus only deepens his attraction to these occult thinkers. The aims of modern science—to explain everyday reality—seem pedestrian beside the grand promises of immortality and power. As he puts it, “I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”

Though Victor warns Walton against repeating his mistakes, his own zeal for playing with fire remains undiminished. When Walton’s crew rebels and demands to abandon the expedition, Victor rebukes them for faltering in the face of danger. He reminds them that the journey was deemed glorious precisely because of its risks and hardships, urging them to stand firm lest they forfeit the heroic stature they once sought. While Victor may partly be driven by his pursuit of the Creature, the fervor of his speech reveals a deeper conviction. In this respect, he differs sharply from the mariner, who sincerely hopes the wedding guest will learn from his tale.

In the end, Walton accepts both the truth of Victor’s story and its moral. When his sailors demand a promise to return home once the ice clears, he yields—torn between ambition and duty. In a pithy letter to his sister, he concedes that his grand hopes are defeated and that he must submit to the will of his crew.

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Summing Up

The word that lingers while reading Frankenstein is desolation. It captures both the stark landscapes in which the narrative unfolds and the inner emotional terrain of its three troubled figures: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the Creature. Yet no less memorable are two presences in the novel that never speak, though they are constantly felt.

One is the relentless cold. The northern breeze striking Walton’s cheeks, the “mountains of ice” imprisoning his ship, the glaciers at Montanvert that frame Victor’s first encounter with the Creature, and the ice raft on which the Creature drifts away to die—these images give the novel its haunting atmosphere.

The other is Margaret, Walton’s sister and the silent recipient of his letters. She is, in effect, the reader. Through this narrative device, Mary Shelley lends verisimilitude to an otherwise improbable tale. We become Margaret—Walton’s confidante—inhabiting his experience through his letters.

The Creature is what we might now call artificial intelligence, with one profound difference: he possesses a soul. On the surface, Frankenstein blends science fiction and horror; but at its core, it is a meditation on finding meaning in a life we did not consent to, one in which suffering is not a bug but a feature—though more severe for some than for others. In this sense, we are all the Creature: recoiling from life’s burdens, yet clinging to it all the same.