Frankenstein (Part One, Chapter Six through Part Two, Chapter Five)

Chapter Six begins with a letter from Victor’s father in which the next phase of the plot is clearly launched.  Victor’s little five-year-old brother has been murdered, and the evidence points to young Justine as the murderer.  On the way home, he passes through the vicinity of the murder site and encounters the amazingly nimble monster he created!  He is convinced that the monster actually committed the murder.  At this point I was reminded that I had watched a movie version of “Frankenstein” many years ago – or perhaps just bits and pieces of the movie – in which a young girl (Justine?) befriends the monster, and that the monster had killed the boy by accident, not understanding what he was doing.  I also seem to remember a scene in which a mob of people with torches pursues the monster at night.  It will be interesting to see how much of this is reflected in the actual text. 

There are several rather odd plot devices that some people might consider just a little too convenient for the author.  For instance, when the monster holes up in an apparently completely unused shed-like structure attached to a shack, he is allowed to eavesdrop through a boarded up window and listen to every word that the inhabitants of the shack utter for months.  The fact that they never hear him make a sound - even snoring when he sleeps – and never think to use or look in the shed for any reason, is just a little too far-fetched.  Mary Shelley is asking us to suspend our credulity here, and in other ways as well.  Perhaps the biggest leap of faith is the fact that the monster employs first-rate diction and elocution in relating his tale to Victor after listening in on the family that lives in the shack for a short while; more than likely a family that doesn’t speak with very admirable elocution itself. 

And looking back to earlier passages, I seem to have missed the segments that I had always been led to believe were in this book regarding the acquisition and assembly of the various body parts and how they were supposedly obtained from questionable sources like a graveyard for criminals.  My understanding is that the version of the story I’m reading is unabridged, so I don’t think these more gruesome details were simply left out.  Also, this copy is supposed to be the original text, before Ms. Shelley was compelled to revise the book so that it wouldn’t offend her readers’ sensibilities.  This classic story has been reworked and embellished in so many ways over the years that I was probably misled on this point. 

The monster’s tale – a story within a story within a story (remember that Victor is relating all this to the captain of the ship in the arctic; our original narrator) – overlooks a number if difficulties and questions left unexplained.  As far as we can tell, the monster “woke up” a blank slate, having no memories remaining from his brain’s previous life.  And yet, he learns how to feed himself, acquires all the survival skills he needs to keep from perishing in the wild, picks up a language by overhearing it, and generally seems to have skipped vast segments of the childhood learning curves we normal people have spent our lives mastering.  But all this serves the purpose of the author in having the monster narrate what happened to him in first person. 

It probably has occurred to most of us that writing in first person relieves an author of many of the burdens of writing well.  After all, any discrepancies, contradictions and even grammatical errors can simply be written off as the idiosyncrasies of the narrating character.  Was Ms. Shelley, at the age of nineteen, perhaps a little apprehensive that her craftsmanship as a writer would be subjected to severe criticism?  So far, her story has had three different first person narrators.  The language to modern ears seems quite erudite, so it’s hard to make such a charge stick.  I particularly like first person prose, so it doesn’t bother me in the least, but I have to believe that was part of the reason.  At any rate, it makes for a very entertaining read in this case!

 

 

 

Next Week: Part Two, Chapter Six through Part Three, Chapter Three