Frankenstein: Closing Thoughts

I said in my first post about Frankenstein that the book wasn't what I had expected.  Where we might expect to find a mad scientist and his monstrous spawn, we find a decent, eccentric man who shuns his benevolent creation.  I am dumbfounded at the notion that this story inspired such weird adaptations in film and television.  While I don't understand how or why the story has changed so drastically, I fully understand and respect its capacity to receive so much attention - even more than a century later.

The presentation of the novel in multiple narrative frames works very well for Frankenstein, and it allows for a myriad of different themes to emerge.  I might even argue that each frame presents a completely self-contained universe.  I don't mean to argue that the events in each frame literally exist separately from the events in the others, since they are all obviously interconnected, but it is possible to view each frame as though it existed on it's own.  Each frame is presented from a different character's point of view, and these characters all have completely unique personalities, histories, and goals.  Any event in any character's story can be analyzed solely from their own perspective, contrasted against the events in another character's story, viewed through any other character's perspective, ad infinitum.  The structure of the novel allows for more complex analysis than even some of the greatest pieces of literature in the cannon.

While Robert Walton is somewhat unimportant from a literary standpoint, the relationship between Victor and his creation is worthy of hundreds of pages of study.  Each character's personality and motivations could be extensively analyzed, as well as how they change as they develop.  Infinitely more could be written on exactly how these characters affect each other (both directly and indirectly).  The interactions of these personalities creates a profound, moving history that could not be fully presented in Frankenstein - or in any other single piece, for that matter.

There are so many more points worthy of discussion in Frankenstein, but I could write for hours about everything I loved in this book and still find more to cover.  Suffice it to say, Frankenstein was a remarkably intricate piece of literature and I loved every word of it.  I hope others can appreciate how grand this novel truly is.