Every character
in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is faced with different challenges and different ways to face their challenges.
But their challenges all coincide and are stitched together throughout the book with different texts, experiences and themes.
The pursuit of knowledge is a theme that Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton, in contrast the Creature faces a lack
of knowledge awareness. Frankenstein and Walton chase after knowledge with a strong will, one desiring to create and be god-like
and the other striving to reach lands that have never been attained. These endeavors eventually lead Frankenstein to his death
and Walton to an understanding that perhaps knowledge isn’t all that it is cut out to be. Even one of the wisest of
all men, King Solomon, said “for in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow”
(Song of Solomon 1:18).
Something else that
connects each of these characters is the innate, sinful, desire to be hateful, almost “monstrous” at times, in
their attitude towards people. Physically, the Creature is a representation of this monstrosity, but he is also an illustration
as to how man in his monstrosity wants to reach out and be loved. The Creature does reach out, but Frankenstein, in his own
selfishness, pulls away from his creation. The Creature reaches out to the only object it knows...and it is received with
rejection. This spurs the Creatures horrible actions and Victors monstrous actions as well. Victor’s scientific scheming
and ideas are monstrous in the beginning but become full-pledged disastrous as we see his hatred toward the Creature and the
society he is in grow stronger and stronger.
Everyone in this
story is associated by strange circumstances and beginnings which are all pieced together with weird twists, different journal
entries and letters. This style of writing leaves every character in the book at arms length and disjointed, like a body that
cannot fully function. There is a distance that the reader senses within the book and it almost makes “Frankenstein,”
the book, to be a monstrous creation all in and of itself.
But I’ll leave
that up to the reader to decide…
