Frankenstein: A Few Thoughts
I finished reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley two weeks ago. These are my raw thoughts, just what stuck with me.
Viktor is an Underground Man
That was my recurring thought throughout the whole book. He knows what he should do. He knows that telling his family about the creature is the right call. But he doesn't do it. He hides, delays, suffers in silence and lets everyone else pay the price.
Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier a man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
The monster is the most self-aware character in the book.
He admits revenge didn't bring him peace. He recognizes what he became. He ends the novel fully aware of his own monstrousness. It's more than Viktor ever managed. Viktor dies still framing everything as someone else's fault.
Appearances really do shape your path.
The creature starts with a good heart. He wants to be virtuous. He watches, reads, learns. And then he's rejected, not for who he is, but for how he looks. There's something uncomfortable and true about that.
Mary Shelley was 18 when she started writing this.
Eighteen. At eighteen, I was trying to figure out what I wanted from life. She was writing one of the most enduring novels in the English language. Wild.
The Arctic as the limit of ambition.
Watson turns back. Viktor dies there. The creature likely follows. Ambition without responsibility doesn't lead to glory. It leads into the lonely and cold artic.
The scenery is stunning.
I didn't expect this, but some of the most memorable passages in the book are just ... descriptions of places.
The Swiss Alps, the mountains of ice, the lakes. The Rhine river.
Shelley paints these landscapes with so much care that they almost feel like characters themselves. A reminder that the world keeps going no matter how consumed you are by your own obsessions.
Quotes that stuck with me
For nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as steady purpose. - Watson
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on a rock. — The Creature
It is also a duty owed to yourself; for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit in society. — Viktor