The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Frankenstein

ReadingRate edition

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, 1818

312 pages · 87,196 words · about 9 hours · regard 91 of 100

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Victor Frankenstein graduates from the University of Ingolstadt convinced he has solved the problem of life itself. He stitches together a creature from corpse parts, animates it with a shock of galvanic electricity, then flees the room in horror when the thing opens its yellow eyes. That moment of abandonment sets in motion everything that follows: a creature left to educate himself through stolen books and secret observation, who discovers he is alone in a world that will never accept him, and who turns his anguish outward. Shelley builds the novel in nested frames—Walton's letters contain Victor's confession, which contains the creature's own eloquent account—so that every narrator implicates the next. Victor casts himself as tragedy's victim; the creature's testimony makes clear he is its cause. The creature reads Paradise Lost and understands his position exactly: not Satan, but Adam abandoned by God. Published in 1818 when Shelley was twenty years old, Frankenstein founded a genre and posed questions that remain unanswered: what do creators owe their creations, and what does society owe those it refuses to see? The prose is formal and dense, the moral architecture stark.

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