Frankenstein: A delightful (though chilly) surprise

Man, this was a good read. It has all sorts of things I like: action, moral debates, Paradise Lost references, cold and windswept plains, murder, inception...

Let's start with inception: There's a tale within a story within a recounting. A brother (Walton) is writing to his sister recounting the story of the inventor (M. Frankenstein) which includes the tale of a desperate monster (the Monster). There is a bit of cognitive dissonance, what with Frankenstein being the name of the inventor and not his creation - and despite knowing this fact, the monster is so thoroughly culturally entrenched as "Frankenstein," it is hard to get over. 

Derailed, sorry. Back to inception. There are many levels of truth and story, and it's difficult to know who to believe - by the time we get to the monster's story, we're reading it 5th-hand: the monster to Frankenstein to Walton to Mary Shelly to reader. The monster's account of things is rather different than Frankenstein's - and who are we to believe? Where does our loyalty reside? With the monster whose affections and desires are so close to our own, or with Frankenstein who wants to protect his friends at the expense of his creation?

Which brings us to friendship. All the principle characters are concerned with having friends: Walton writes of his loneliness and weariness aboard his ice-bound exploratory ship and his joy at picking up this random man on the ice (that'd be Frankenstein), Frankenstein expounds upon degrees of friendships and why the companions of childhood are so enduring, the monster yearns for friends so ardently that when he is rejected by the peasants of the French countryside, he turns murderous and terrifying. The monster says that "to see their sweet looks directed towards me with affection was the utmost limit of my ambition." This is not a power-mad dictator or an intellectual savant; he wants neither wealth nor fame, does not look for material comforts or rich food: he wants only affection, connection, love. He wants companionship - and in this desire, perhaps we see Frankenstein's greatest success. Though he failed to make a creature that looked human, he made one that acts human: a being that desires love, and failing to receive it, turns bitter, angry, and vengeful: "I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me, and finding myself unsympathsized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin." 

Some quick and amusing annotations from my reading: 
- "If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear"--> All will love me and despair
- "I am sent to nurse you and get you well" --> Albino in the Pit of Despair
- "a momentary return of delirium" --> a moment of madness, just a touch of the crazy
- Having seen this problem a mile off, when Frankenstein says "when I thought that I had prepared only my own death, I hastened that of a far dearer victim," (namely, Elizabeth, his childhood friend and almost-wife) I needed only three letters in the annotation: duh 
- "Felix...the saddest of the group" --> which is funny, because Felix means 'happy or fortunate'

And finally, as if inception tales, contemplation of friendship, moral depravity, how to determine what's write and what's wrong, and revenge weren't enough, Shelley throws in some sassy Irishmen. Frankenstein sails around in a little boat, and thinks he lands still in England. Upon receiving terse words from the people on the beach, he says, "Why do you answer me so roughly? Surely it is not the custom of Englishmen to receive strangers so inhospitably." To which the rejoinder: "I do not know what the custom of the English may be, but it is the custom of the Irish to hate villains." BAM. 

xo, 
Devo