Language, Form and Structure

• Narrative technique


  1. Framed or embedded narratives

  2. Chinese box structure of stories-within-stories
• Stages of the narrative structure

  • Epistolary, frame narrative - Walton's letters
  • Embedded narrative - Victor's story, part 1
  • Secondary embedded narrative - the Creature's narrative
  • Embedded narrative - Victor's story, part 2
  • Epistolary, frame narrative - Walton's conclusions
• Effect of the narrative structure

  Non-linear and incomplete, depend upon each other to make sense
• Walton's initial narrative introduces us to Victor towards the end of his predicament, the story is not delivered in chronological order
• The creature's narrative fills in the gaps behind the death of William and the framing of Justine
• Victor


  Story designed to provide a warning, hence events within it are shaped to provide a moral/message
• Victor's narrative


  • Linear/ bildungsroman structure
  • Interrupted by comments made in hindsight, such as 'When I look back, it seems to me...' and his ominous reference to 'my dear friend Clerval' at the opening of Volume 3, clearly foreshadowing his murder
• Victor's life


  Driven by the force of destiny, imbuing specific events/decisions with a prophetic power that certainly wouldn't have had at the time
• Specific events/decisions in Victor's life

  • At the end of Chapter 2 after an un-named 'man of great research' explains 'electricity and galvanism' to him, he suggests that, 'Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction.'
• By observing Victor's comments on the past, we can assess the extent to which he has fully realised the implications of his actions and indeed, the level of personal responsibility felt
• In the earlier chapters, there is a level of poignancy when Victor remembers his early childhood and comments that suggest he has full recognition of his childish arrogance: 'Besides I had contempt for the uses of natural philosophy'/ 'As a child, I had not been content.../ 'childish caprice'
• Victor's story has a persuasive purpose
• Walton's style


  • Aspects of parody
  • Features of the Romantic and Gothic, but often his comments feel hyperbolic, excessively sentimental and rather self-conscious
  • Projecting his own image of a Romantic explorer onto Victor
• "the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour"
• Victor's story


  • Designed to provide a warning, hence events within it are shaped to provide a moral/message
  • Linear/bildungsroman structure interrupted by comments made in hindsight
  • Presents his life as driven by the force of destiny, imbuing specific events/decisions with a prophetic power
• After an un-named 'man of great research' explains 'electricity and galvanism' to him, Victor suggests that 'Destiny was too potent, and her immutable laws had decreed my utter and terrible destruction'
• By observing Victor's comments on the past, we can assess the extent to which he has fully realised the implications of his actions and the level of personal responsibility felt
• In the earlier chapters, there is a level of poignancy when Victor remembers his early childhood
• Creature


  • The narrative here is a clear example of persuasive rhetoric
  • Its purpose is to convince Victor to assume his responsibilities and construct a mate for him
  • Persuasive strategies used include: convincing him of his education and ability to reason (e.g. his discussion of 'Paradise Lost' is almost literary criticism)
  • Speaking with eloquence
  • Acknowledging his superiority as 'my creator'
  • Gaining his sympathy by demonstrating his desire for companionship and love (emphasised through the idealistic depiction of the De Laceys)
• Persuasive strategies


  1. Convincing him of his education and ability to reason (e.g. his discussion of 'Paradise Lost' is almost literary criticism)

  2. Speaking with eloquence

  3. Acknowledging his superiority as 'my creator'

  4. Gaining his sympathy by demonstrating his desire for companionship and love (emphasised through the idealistic depiction of the De Laceys)
• Victor often mis-reads situations and seems woefully unaware of those who surround him


  Comparing himself to Justine, just before her execution (the tortures of the accused did not equal mine') and his self-absorbed grief after the death of William and Justine; his father has to remind him that he 'suffers' also!
• Victor's dreams, which he makes no attempt to analyse, also suggest his true feelings; he asserts he doesn't want to marry Elizabeth until he has dealt with the creature, but his Freudian dreams of his mother and birth, along with his 'test-tube' baby suggest far deeper issues.
• The interlocking narratives also allow us to see double and parallels far more clearly
• Walton's ambitions make him a potential Frankenstein

  (even their language mirrors each other's)
• Walton's longing for companionship


  Highlights the key difference between them
• The alienation of Walton on the ship and his anxieties about his education pale into insignificance against those of the creature, who is truly alone, cast adrift in the existential 'darkness' of a lonely abyss in the novel's final image.
• Narrative closure


  The death of Victor and Walton's return home suggest a resolution, but the creature's disappearance 'lost in the darkness and distance' defers true closure, giving the ending symbolic value
• The text is constructed (in almost post-modern fashion) out of fragments of other texts, the main sources being Prometheus, Paradise Lost and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Shelley creates a dialogue with these texts, appropriating them to allow the reader draw analogies and allusions from the secondary material
• The characterisation of Victor suggests the opposite, that he is not an admirable over-reacher although Walton would like to see him as a divine wanderer
• If Victor is a 'modern' Prometheus


  Does this suggest electricity is the new fire or that in a secular world, there is no God/gods to punish him; instead he punishes himself
• The epigraph from 'Paradise Lost'

  Encourages the reader to equate Victor with God and the creature with Adam, but the division is not so simple
• The monster

  Also becomes a demon - 'thy fallen angel' and seeks to usurp Victor/God
• Walton's journey

  Is like Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', into the reaches of the Arctic
• Victor

  Is certainly the mariner, defying God as the mariner shoots the albatross
• Victor


  Descends into a personal hell, devoid of family and alienated in the furthest reaches of the earth, like the mariner descends into an existential hell ('a painted ship upon a painted ocean'), devoid of natural life and God
• Each narrative

  • Is filtered through the subjective perception of the teller
• George Levine suggests that 'everything eternal is transformed into large public or high rhetorical argument'
• The text


  • Highly Romantic
  • Events dealt with in an analytical and often critical manner
  • Mirroring the philosophical and political texts of the 17th century
• The monster's eloquence


  • Deals with antitheses, oxymoron, religious allusions and impressive use of balance and opposition