Spoilers First
Hold on to that picture, because it is the whole shape of this book.
Spoiler warning, right now. This is a full summary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with every death and the ending. If you have not read it yet, my spoiler free review is the better first stop.
One thing before the story. Our copy is the eighteen thirty-one text, from Delphi Classics, with four letters and then twenty-four chapters. Shelley first published in eighteen eighteen, so some details may differ in that earlier edition. The del Toro film has its own video on this channel, and this one is only the book.
Here is the short version. A ship captain writes to his sister about a man he pulled from the ice. That man, Victor, tells him how he made a living being and lost everyone he loved. And in the middle, the being speaks for himself.
Three Cups
Here is my own count, made from the eighteen thirty-one text, with the publisher’s front matter and catalogue left out. The story is about seventy-seven thousand words.
The outer cup is the ship captain, Robert Walton. His four opening letters and his closing letters add up to about ten thousand eight hundred words, fourteen percent.
The middle cup is Victor Frankenstein, with about fifty-one and a half thousand words, sixty-six and a half percent. That includes the letters and speeches he quotes. The small inner cup is the creature’s own story, chapters eleven to sixteen, fifteen thousand ninety-two words, nineteen and a half percent.
So the creature tells Victor, Victor tells Walton, and Walton writes it down for his sister Margaret. We will go from the outside in, and then back out.
The Outer Cup
The book opens with Walton’s first letter, from Saint Petersburgh. He is bound for the north pole, and he imagines a land of eternal light.
His father forbade a sailor’s life on his deathbed, so Walton tried poetry for a year, failed, then inherited money and began preparing. In his second letter he is brutally honest. He writes that he has no friend, and he says he is twenty-eight.
Letter three is a short note about ice and a leak. In letter four, the crew sees a sledge carrying a being of gigantic stature, racing north. The next morning a second sledge drifts up, with a starving European on it. He asks where they are bound, and says he came to seek one who fled from him.
Geneva and Ingolstadt
Now Victor begins. He grows up in Geneva with his friend Henry Clerval and with Elizabeth Lavenza. In our text she is an orphan his mother found in a cottage by Lake Como, adopted as a gift for Victor, though everyone calls her cousin.
At thirteen he finds the old alchemists and is hooked. At about fifteen he watches lightning shatter an oak, and a visitor explains electricity. So the lightning in this book belongs to his boyhood, not to the creation.
At seventeen, his mother dies of scarlet fever, caught while nursing Elizabeth. Her last wish is that they marry. Victor leaves for Ingolstadt, where Professor Krempe sneers at his alchemy and Professor Waldman sends him toward chemistry.
Two years of study end in the charnel houses. He decides to build a being about eight feet tall. He calls his attic room a workshop of filthy creation.
The Night in November
The creation takes one paragraph. It is a dreary November night, one in the morning, rain on the window, a candle nearly burnt out. By that dying light he sees the dull yellow eye of the creature open. There is no storm and no assistant.
He had chosen beautiful features, and the result horrifies him. Yellow skin, black lips, watery eyes. Victor runs. He dreams that Elizabeth turns into his dead mother’s corpse, and he wakes to find the creature at his bed, one hand reaching out. He flees again.
Clerval arrives soon after, and Victor collapses into a nervous fever that lasts for months. When he recovers, the room is empty. The creature is gone, and Victor tells no one.
Two Deaths
In the spring Victor gets a letter from his father with three words. William is dead. His little brother was found strangled near Geneva, and their mother’s miniature portrait is missing.
Victor hurries home through a night storm. In a flash of lightning he sees a huge figure in the dark, and he knows. But he says nothing. Who would believe him, and he fears being thought mad.
The household servant Justine is accused, because the miniature was found in her pocket. At her trial, nobody believes her. Then her confessor threatens her with hell fire, so she confesses a lie, and she is executed. Victor knows the truth and still stays silent. That silence is his first great failure.
The Glacier
Sick with guilt, Victor goes up to Chamounix to clear his head. On the Mer de Glace, the sea of ice, the creature comes bounding toward him over the ice at great speed.
Victor curses him and lunges, and the creature simply steps aside. Then he speaks, and he is eloquent. He says he ought to have been Victor’s Adam, but is rather the fallen angel. He says he was good, and misery made him a fiend.
Victor agrees to listen. They climb to a hut on the mountain, and here the inner cup begins.
The Inner Cup
The creature remembers waking in the forest as a flood of sensations. He finds fire, burns his hand, and learns. Villagers throw stones at him, and he hides in a lean-to against a cottage, where he watches a family through a chink.
They are Felix, Agatha and their blind father, De Lacey. The creature learns their words. He stops stealing their food, and he secretly leaves them firewood. They call him a good spirit.
When a woman called Safie arrives, Felix teaches her French from a history book, and the creature learns beside her. He learns about property and cruelty, and sees his own reflection in a pool. He also finds a bag of books, among them Paradise Lost, and he finds Victor’s journal in his own coat pocket.
At last he speaks to the blind De Lacey, who is kind. Then the others return. Agatha faints, and Felix beats him with a stick. The creature does not fight back.
The Bargain
That night he burns the cottage. He swears war on mankind and heads for Geneva. On the way he saves a drowning girl, and her companion shoots him.
In Geneva he seizes a boy, hoping to raise a friend. The boy says his father is a syndic, M. Frankenstein. The creature strangles him, takes the miniature, and plants it on a sleeping woman in a barn. That is how Justine was framed.
Now his demand. Make me a female companion, and we will vanish to South America. Victor says I consent, on the condition that they leave Europe forever.
Victor delays. He travels with Clerval to London, then goes alone to a remote island in Orkney. There, he sees the creature grinning at the window, and he tears the unfinished female apart. The creature promises, I shall be with you on your wedding night.
The Wedding Night
Victor sinks the remains at sea, falls asleep in the boat, and drifts to Ireland. He is arrested for a strangled man. The body is Clerval. Victor spends two months in a fever, and about three months in prison, and is freed when proof places him on Orkney.
Back in Geneva he marries Elizabeth. Victor carries pistols, and he assumes the creature means to kill him. At an inn near Evian he tells her to retire. She screams, and he finds her strangled. He fires at the creature at the window and misses.
His father dies within days. Victor swears revenge at the graves, and the creature laughs behind him.
The Chase
The pursuit runs through the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Tartary and Russia. The creature leaves messages for him, and sometimes a dead hare to eat, so that Victor can keep following him north.
In the ice, Victor gets a sledge and dogs. The creature steals them and crosses the frozen sea. The ice splits, Victor drifts on a floe, and Walton’s ship takes him in. That is where we began.
Back on the Ship
In the closing letters, Walton says he believes the story. In September the ship is trapped in ice, and his sailors demand to turn south. Victor rallies them with a speech, be men, or be more than men, but Walton agrees to return.
Victor dies. He tells Walton he did right to refuse a companion, and to seek tranquillity, not ambition.
At midnight Walton finds the creature over the coffin, weeping. He says that is also his victim, and that evil became his good. Walton calls him a hypocrite. The creature says he will build a funeral pile at the northern end of the world and burn himself. He leaves on an ice raft and is lost in darkness and distance. The book never shows him die.
Why Three Narrators
Here is my opinion, as a draft. The frame is why this book still argues with us. Walton is a second Victor, hungry for glory and ready to risk other men’s lives, and Victor’s story is a warning to him.
And Victor, the man telling it, is not neutral. Walton says the creature is eloquent, and Victor says do not trust him. We hear both, and never get a judge.
In my view, the nesting makes you do the judging. The cups are stacked so that the one person nobody listens to, the creature, sits at the centre of every telling.
Your Turn
That is Frankenstein, from the outside in. Tell me in the comments: which narrator do you trust most, Walton, Victor or the creature?
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