Frankenstein - Letters

Alright, it’s about time I sat down and actually read this thing. Frankenstein’s one of those books that some classes were assigned in high school, but it sort of varied from teacher to teacher whether you read it or not. As such, I never have. I do know some things about the novel just based on cultural osmosis and from knowing about the movie, which I also haven’t seen. So here’s what I do know about it.

-The general plot? That Dr. Victor Frankenstein makes a monster and it’s just kind of exploring the ramifications of that? I think he escapes. I’m pretty sure he meets a blind man at one point and maybe kills a child accidentally?

-The monster can speak in the book.

-The monster, though unnamed in the movie and book proper, was referred to as Adam by Mary Shelley.

-I’ve heard that the character of Victor Frankenstein was sort of Shelley giving a light ribbing to Lord Byron.

Other than that, I don’t really know much about it. I know it’s considered the first sci-fi book by many, and it straddles the line between that genre and horror. I also know that it’s subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” so I imagine that there’ll be more mythological/religious parallels made surrounding the monster as a sort of transhuman entity.

That all said, let’s start this:

An interesting way to set up the story. We’ve got a series of letters from a man named Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville back in England. I notice that the letters are all dated “17—“, a deliberately non-specified date I guess. I’ve never been sure what non-specific past dates really add to a story. I always sort of figure that they’re there to set a scene and give a general feel to a piece, but it sometimes seems to me like that should be able to come across without a vague time period laid out. I think it’s different than guessing into the future as well, since that is necessarily guesswork anyways. Anyways, just a brief thought.

Walton writes to his sister that he’s exploring the North Pole, and I do like that he outright states that Robert is writing to Margaret per her request. It lends some character to a relationship which I doubt we’ll ever see both sides of. Robert’s up in the Arctic for fairly vague reasons. Seems like he’s mostly just interested in exploring it and learning about it so that he’ll become famous. While he’s up there though, he sees a giant man on a dogsled moving across a giant field of ice his ship is stuck in.

The next day, a second man appears next to the ship, him and his dogsled both in shambles. Walton’s crew takes the man aboard and finds him to be a melancholic sort of person who’s here chasing down the giant sledman. Walton and the man strike up a friendship and begin to talk. Maybe this is just a historical data thing: but how is Walton getting these letters to his sister? The first few he states that he’s sending with various merchants he finds, but the final few once he and his crew are stuck in the ice? I’m left wondering.

I’m going to assume that the man they picked up is Victor F. and the figure he was chasing was Adam. I know that most depictions of the book’s Frankenstein look different, but I’m having a lot of fun imagining Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein on a dogsled in the Arctic. Also, is Vic always going to be this.. dramatic? I kind of want him to just be like this all of the time. He’s kind of (really) a showboat and I get the feeling that Walton is puffing the image of him up a bit because he identifies similarly to him as some lost hopeless romantic/knowledge seeker.

The book’s taking a Heart of Darkness turn by the end, with the stranger saying he’ll tell his story to Walton, so that he might get the moral which the stranger himself has learned the hard way. To be wary of the pursuit for more knowledge.