Frankenstein - Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Overall: a good ending, despite the sadness, the best they could've hoped for.

Thus concludes Vic’s story. Or rather, he concludes it basically how it might’ve been inferred. He’s spent a long time chasing Adam down. Adam, for his part, is resolved to keep Victor alive so that the chase can continue and Victor will feel more misery. That’s pretty fucking sadistic, gotta say. Vic is resigned to his death at this point. He is only holding onto life out of a sense of kinship with Walton and the possibility of enacting revenge against Adam.

Vic’s attitude is still kinda… well it’s mixed. Now that we’ve returned to Walton’s narration, I think the book allows us to see in some way how pitiful Victor has really become. which I appreciate. He’s haggard, he sleeps a lot (as that’s the only way he can feel happiness), he talks big about how people should have the courage to accomplish their dreams or die trying, but it’s so apparent that he’s about to do the latter that it isn’t much of a surprise that the sailors on Walton’s ship, despite Vic’s protests, ask him to turn the ship around and head back for England. Vic, in his final moments, is kind of delusional about his memory of the events that have proceeded. He says that he always tried to do his best by Adam. That’s bullshit, he only ever even considered Adam’s feelings after Adam told his backstory. He says he refused to make another for the good of humanity. Okay, sure, but there were easy ways to avoid a population of them and in so doing you directly led to the deaths of several innocent people.

For his part, Walton wants to continue, but upon seeing Vic’s death he becomes distraught. Later that night, Adam appears in Vic’s cabin and is distraught over the death of his enemy. Adam here is… really also pretty bad. He talks so much like Vic. About how no one can understand the pain that he feels. How the entirety of existence is conspired against him. Taking the body of Vic, he sets out toward the North pole, where he says he’s going to light a fire and burn himself to death. That way he’ll leave no remains of his body for a person to try to emulate. Adam leaves, and Walton is left to contemplate everything that’s just happened.

So that's Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Overall, I was surprised by how different the novel is to the popular understanding of the Frankenstein story. Even from the get-go, the positioning of the story starting from a first-person recounting of Vic's childhood shows that the scope is going to be much more broad than the "guy creates monster, monster escapes" narrative. I liked the explorations of nature a lot and the subtle contrasts between Vic, Clerval, and Adam with regard to that. I have since learned that Shelley meant this as a critique of the hubris of science. I think that, if that's the case, it may be rather temporal as it reads more of a critique of God or religion generally, with Vic playing the role of a neglectful/absent creator who leaves Adam to his own devices, struggling in a hostile world. Seriously, if Vic hadn't made Adam ugly or had arsed to stay around his creation, then much of the conflict seems like it would've gone down a different course. I know that's the point, that he doesn't, but like I said I'm just examining this sort of disconnect between a critique of science/critique of religion that jumps out at me within the book.

As for what I'll be reading next: I'll be jumping forward a bit in time to the late 1800's and going with a much shorter story. I was originally going to read Jules Verne's "A Journey to the Center of the Earth" but realized through reading some of it that I really knew much of the story already and that the book wasn't really grabbing me. So instead I'll tackle two works by his counterpart: HG Wells! Starting with The Time Machine and then probably doing War of the Worlds before moving into the 20th century.