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The Creator and the Creation
Frankenstein---The word conjures up an image of a gigantic monster out to demolish mankind and everything attributed to it,an ogre created by man bent on dissolving his maker in utter misery. "Frankenstein" has travelled over the ages to become synonymous with destrution,blood,murder,havoc,fear and everything and anything that's even remotely associated with evil. "Frankenstein" has become a cliche. <
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>And that's exactly where the greatness of the authoress Mary Shelley rests. The plot in the novel is simple enough---a young ardent man steeply soaked in "natural philosophy" creates a monster with his genius,regrets his doing,asunders it and then suffers the agony of his own architect---but the classic proportions of the tale are vividly accounted in the entwining philosophies,morals,allusionsand allegory that it invokes to. It's indeed a wonder that Shelley could've exploited an innovative, simple idea to garb it into a massively broad saga at the tender age of 19,but then again, that's what you cal greatness. Take Mozart for inatance. He was composing symphonies and operas when he was barely six! <
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>Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" begins when a friendless, doughty and resiliently ambitious seafarer Robert Walton saves a strange man from the brink of death amidst a sea of ice whose first words are:"Before I come on board your vessel, will you have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound?" This is Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein and the whole novel revolves around him and the monster he had created. Walton writes to his sister Margaret in Englang about the fall of Frankenstein from greatness and as the tale unfolds from the man of science's own shivering lips, we've taken on a rie on a wave that flatters to deceives. <
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>Victor Frankenstein is young Swiss who leaves his hometown Geveva to pursue natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt. His knowledge of Cornelius Agrappa, Alberta Magnus and Paracelus pushes him towards a realm beyond the confined boundary of chemistry and two years of dedication and devotion and Professos M.Walton's "words of fate,enounced to destroy" him reaps a result of magnanimous proportions. He creates "the daemon", his "own vampire, my(his) own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to men", a monster whose gigantic stature,ugly features,hoarse voice and crude appearance repugnates its maker and Frankenstein denounces im. And denounces his fortune,career, family.peace of mind and charm of life. <
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>For he monster,unbaptized and solitary,comes back again and again to haunt the Swiss. It first kills his youngest brother William,then transfigures into he cause of the doom of the innocent Justine Moritz who's falsely charged with the child's murder;the ogre puts Frankenstein's childhood friend Henry Clerval to death,mortifies his father to his death-bed,destroys the life of his love Elizabeth on their wedding night,allures his creator to death's dwelling and ultimately drags himself to te inevitable end. <
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>The plot then is as plain as white paper,as ever so slightly whispered earlier, but that the scope of discussion of characters and events is as extensive as the horizon is illustriously brought to the picture as we explore the landscape of "Frankenstein". The reader cannot help but sympathise both with the creator and his creation---one repenting his "unhllowed arts" for being "not in deed,but in effect" the curse and murderer of one's family,and by extent,mankind;the other willing to harmonise oneself into the fabrication of society when one's physical features are nt withstanding. The notion of Frankenstein an ignorant and languid person pets is that of a hideous fiend mustered from animation pictures and cartoons but the essence of it transcends much farther from this simple prejudice. <
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>The theme of the novel,that of man inviting his own destruction and being chased by his own myriad forces of vices,is disturbing enough and the sophistication even more muddling. Frankenstein is a distorted harmless young man who realises his blunder when it's too late. A man shadowed by a curse he himself has raised and who loses one beloved after another is always going to transpire confusement and indecision and so does he who actually makes the novel happen. He seeks revenge but knows not how,he is compassionate towards his "fiend enemy" but refuses to show it. The reader embarks on his queerness not to fulfill his promise and manufacture female partner for his creation. Frankenstein reasons with himself that two fiends would be one too many for the world to endure and their posterity could aspire to evilry. But was he right to believe what Brutus did of Caesar in William Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"? That "He would be crown'd:/How that might change his nature, there's the question.....Fashion it thus:that what he is,augmenter,/Would run to these and these extremities? That he should kill his own child and "sport thus with life"? <
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>And indeed was Frankenstein's monster as terrible and catastrophic as he deciphered him to be? In the struggle of this fiend to congregate his being with men and their ways,we find an underlying sense of pathos and self-consciouness expressed bluntly and confusedly. At one moment, the colossal beast stoops down to piti and submission:"Was I then a monster,a blot upon the earth,from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?" On another occasion,he tranmutes into a figure of abhorrence and disastrous:"You are my creator, but I am your master;obey". This juggling of self-assertion and self-submission makes the giant a confused,complex individual as well as a victim of circumstances since his motives are misconstrued. The cruel end of his strangely pleasant relationship with the cottagers and the rustic soughting "to destroy the saviour of his child" provide testimonies. The reader discerns his parallel with Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice",whose tale too is a tragedy of circumstancs, the awkwardness and hardships of a Bohemian surviving on the fringes of human attachment. <
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>The similarities between the Creator and the Creation are in abundance and are stark. Both are equally anguished---the Creator rueing His germ of an idea to build anything so splendourly ugly and the Creation questioning his independence and the Creator's need to make him. This is the allegory,or if you will,the theme of of Shelley's darkly eerie narrative. The invokation to the first-person narrative,the plethora of similes and metaphors,the lofty diction and the intricacy of language augment to the authoress's aim to portray the dark shades of life on a more gentle and a lighter backdrop. In Frankenstein's pursuit of his monster,the authoress alludes to man's constant hunt of vice in his own self,in the fiend's direct conveyance of his mortal,spiritual and moral wounds,Shelley reveals the hopelessness of the socially deprived;in the end, she hungs upon the wall the conclusion that all such chases ollide with. Herman Melville's classic "Moby Dick" ran on a similar line and it,like "Frankenstein",is a tour de force. First publisher in 1818 and set against the era of the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley's intuitive idea dressed in wondrous clothes sparkling with divine metaphysics and resonding portayal of life,truth and futility sustains a powerful impact on us even long after w've closed the book and started chasing our own Frankenstein's monster. <
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YUCK! DONT READ IT ITS HORRIBLE
this book was soo boring i stopped reading it because the book took forever to get somewhere. WASTE OF TIME!

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Best book I was ever forced to read
I was required to read this book in college for my information technology & society course. At first I was hesitant, for I was not generally a fan of books that I was required to read in class, with the exception of "The Importance of Being Earnest." However, I found that, as with "Earnest", I was pleasantly surprised. I became so absorbed in the book that it only took me two days to read it. "Frankenstein" is a story that questions ethics, society and relationships. It is dark in the same way as "Dracula," but unlike "Dracula", which is also a fine book, there is an undertone of tenderness and sadness. The monster and Dr. Frankenstein both become neither hero nor villain, and the reader finds themself wondering whose side to choose.