In the fifth chapter of volume two , in my edition of Frankenstein, the monster learns everything from the history of empire to means of mercantile distribution, such as the “division of property, [the] immense wealth and squalor of povery,” and the societal social stratification along lines of “rank, descent, and noble blood” (122). In the second volume, the story of Frankenstein’s monster, narrated by the monster itself, can be conceived as an embedded text, which Mieke Bal describes as “a complete story with an elaborate fabula,” a fabula being “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are cause or experienced by actors” (Bal 5, 57).

This embedded text within Frankenstein works as a counter narrative to Victor Frankenstein’s narrative of apathetic science, which shows how logic displaced from social or historical empathy has disastrous consequences. Whereas Victor is concerned with the “new and almost unlimited powers” to be acquired by scientific thought, the monster engages with Milton’s Paradise Lost, marveling at the “different and far deeper emotions” that it excited” (Shelly 57, 132). This is not to say that the monster’s narrative is without problematic elements, as the monster describes its education relating to the “slothful Asiatics,” compared to “the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians” (122).

However, as a precocious observer of society in modernity, the monster narrative provides a realistic picture of humanity’s ethical dualism: noting how man “appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle, and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike” (122). As the monstrous narrator understands himself as an outsider, it acts as a physically disfigured tabula rasa, noting how “sorrow only increased with knowledge” (123). In the monster’s narrative, the knowledge found within books leads to a comprehensive enlightenment, an enlightenment that must attest to the wealth of human truths: both divine and depraved.

Peace

—Nathaniel Schwass

Sources:

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. University of Toronto Press, 2009.