Explore the presentation of the monster in ‘Frankenstein’

To a large degree, the novel ‘Frankenstein’ can be seen as a book of journeys. From the very opening we are introduced to Walton’s geographical ascent, as he pursues a land “never before imprinted by the foot of man.” As his boat ventured northwards, we are simultaneously introduced to Victor Frankenstein’s ‘meta-narrative’, which reveals his own intellectual journey into undiscovered territory. Certainly one journey reflects the other – the fact that the doctor relates his story on the boat itself, gives rise to a certain thematic harmony; the geographical and intellectual pursuits literally and figuratively accompanying one another. Yet the third journey I shall address, and arguably the most pertinent to the content of the essay, is of a very different sort altogether. The reader here is no third party spectator, but rather the traveller, and through various narrative modulations, will undergo a ‘perceptive’ journey. It is with particular regard to this third journey that I address the presentation of the creature, my primary focus being the transitory, ever-changing picture of him that the reader forms. This will be an image which will be constructed and then re-constructed- fed by the various conflicting narratives that interweave the novel.
Rather than our first sight of the creature being the moment of his re-animation, it is when he is yet an unborn concept, no more than a pure intellectual fantasy, that we glimpse the creature’s perceived existential significance. Dressed in idyllic, almost prophetic terms, Frankenstein’s moment of ‘enlightenment’ - when he first conceives of his ‘brain-child’ - carries the resonances of a pseudo-religious revelation; a “light” which dawns on the doctor “from the midst of darkness.” The creature will be bestowed with an “excellent nature”, “blessing” the doctor as its “father and creator” – thus a being not only with seeming ‘divine’ origins - but perhaps the