In a society where the name “Frankenstein” is laughed off as a Halloween costume trend, it’s surprising how much real impact and meaning a book whose fame is almost spectacularly unprecedented can have. “Frankenstein,” by author Mary Shelley as a book, has an impact – and indeed, it is its legacy that has carried its name down to even the present day.
Victor Frankenstein, the central character of the book, initially sets out to create life from inanimate, dead corpses. Obsessed with a need to validate his research and to take science beyond its natural scope, he takes part in inhumane actions, from stealing body parts from graveyards and madly, blindly manipulating them to create what he idealizes as the perfect human, who would transgress all known natural laws between life and death, taking humankind to an entirely new field of science it had never been able to cross the threshold of.
But he soon comes to his senses, if albeit too late. Upon discovering the “secret to life” and creating a human from a convoluted assemblage of dead body parts, the full weight of his actions – and the horror he has created – strikes him. And when he flees the scene, an entirely new nightmare of his life begins, as the so-apparent “monster” he has created attempts to find a life of its own.
Author Mary Shelley paints us a spellbinding world, where “good” and “bad” mean nothing. Brilliantly, her world allows the reader to sympathize with the characters – none of her characters are either “good” or “bad” by nature. Indeed, her characters are startlingly lifelike and human.
“Frankenstein” thus illustrates our human legacy – by dispassionately and bluntly describing characters so lifelike and thus, so familiar to us, the book’s impact transcends that of the typical sci-fi thriller, and becomes a poetic reminder of our natures as people and sentient beings.
Of course, Shelley hyperbolizes the situation until it seems almost comic, at times, to compare it to our lives. But if not anything else, the hyperbolic reactions and intensity of the characters add to the book’s rich color and forces us to truly reconsider and reevaluate characters who we otherwise may have dismissed.
What does being a monster mean? What does dealing with a monster entail? Shelley probes into our conscious, and allows us to understand poignantly what life means – and all the sordid details it entails.
The rhetorical questions in the last paragraph made it introspective and especially more memorable. Very well done!