Frankenstein

I must confess, Frankenstein is a story unlike any monster narrative I've ever read (mostly watched). Film and television has warped the image of Frankenstein into something almost entirely apart from the original character. Until this point, I have held a completely wrong opinion of what Frankenstein is about and how beautiful and original it truly is.

The layout of the story, a narrative within a narrative, is brilliant and only adds to the appeal. It is well formed and presented with such passionate and beautiful visual language that it reads better than many stories that I've read before. There is so much meat to the characters, and they are presented so clearly, that I feel true emotions for them and their situations. Their development and evolution through the story is deep and ever changing as I watched my opinions of them morph from the beginning to the end.

I feel as though this book is more of a tragedy than any sort of horror, for the truly terrifying part was how sad the life of the monster truly was. Knowledge only fueled the creatures sadness, merely providing the words for how he had already felt. The more he learned, the more he became aware of his true situation, the more he became aware of how much he longed for companionship. Emotions only fuel emotions throughout this entire piece, with humanities fear and ignorance stoking the flames of anger and violence, and the monsters sadness and confusion giving way to fear and anger. The monster only yearned for companionship, a basic human need, something humanity wasn't willing to provide. It was through their retaliation to him that they created the true monster, depriving him of what life needs drove him to madness and murder. Frankensteins monster was merely misunderstood, a reflection of his own abandonment.