Fair warning: this gives everything away, ending included. If you haven’t read it yet, you have about two hundred pages’ head start. The Creature runs faster.
Mary Shelley started Frankenstein at eighteen, during a rainy summer on Lake Geneva, because of a challenge among friends: everyone had to write a ghost story. Two centuries later it still works, and not just because of the monster. Underneath, it’s beautifully engineered.
The premise in one sentence
A student obsessed with defeating death brings a being made from corpses to life, runs from it that same night, and has to take responsibility for what he’s made before his creature, alone and rejected, takes revenge on the people he loves.
Notice the phrase holding it all up: take responsibility. Victor never does. That’s the novel.
Who’s the protagonist?
The Creature has the more moving arc: it starts out good, teaches itself to read in hiding, and ends up becoming exactly what everyone saw. Read only the middle of the book and Victor is the villain.
In our take-apart we made Victor the protagonist and the Creature the antagonist. The reason is structural: the pieces follow Victor’s choices. He sets the story in motion, he makes the promise and breaks it, he does the chasing at the end. But for six chapters the roles flip, and that’s exactly what makes the book so uncomfortable. His antagonist is right far too often.
His drawers, as we read them:
- He wants to discover the secret of life and beat death. Later, to be rid of what he’s done.
- He needs to own it: care for his creature or, at the very least, tell the truth in time.
- He believes that what happens in his workshop is his own business, and that keeping quiet is enough.
The wound: his mother dies of scarlet fever just before he leaves for university. A few pages later, Victor is in charnel houses working out how to bring the dead back. Nobody spells it out. Nobody has to.
Three narrators, one inside the other
This is what makes Frankenstein the textbook case. The novel is boxes inside boxes:
- Walton, an explorer bound for the North Pole, writes letters to his sister.
- On the ice he rescues Victor, who tells him his life story. Walton writes it down.
- Partway through Victor’s story, the Creature tells Victor its own.
- And inside that, the Creature tells the story of the De Lacey family, whom it spied on through a crack in the wall.
Each layer has a job. Walton is a mirror: he has Victor’s ambition, and his ship stuck in the ice asks the same question on a smaller scale. Push on at any cost, or turn back? Victor chose wrong. Walton, in the end, turns back: he’s the only one who learns the book’s lesson. The Creature pulls off something no external narrator could: it makes the reader listen before judging. Victor sees a monster. We, for six chapters, hear someone.
In Sunday Plot’s Outline you can see it in each scene’s “Narrator” field: Walton in the letters, Victor in his account, the Creature in chapters 11 to 16.
Hint: if you’re thinking about a nested narrator, ask what changes when someone tells it to someone. Victor tells his life to Walton as a warning, and that soaks every page in guilt.
The pieces: where it fits and where it doesn’t
With Wake the Dragon, Victor’s story has all fourteen pieces, in order. The most telling ones:
- Nothing to See Here (Yet) shows up twice, once per narrator: Walton heading for the Pole, hungry for glory and very lonely, and Victor’s happy childhood in Geneva.
- All Hell Breaks Loose: his mother dies, and a lecture by Professor Waldman sets him alight. Science can beat death.
- No Turning Back: one November night, the Creature opens a dull yellow eye and Victor bolts. Few decisions come with less of a way back.
- Someone Has Other Plans: the Creature kills William and lets Justine take the blame. Victor keeps quiet.
- Upside Down: the Creature demands a companion and Victor promises to make one. He thinks he’s buying peace. It’s a false victory.
- I Smell Smoke: “I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Victor is sure the threat is against him, and tells no one. The bomb is a sentence he reads wrong.
- Rock Bottom: in Ireland, a magistrate shows him a body. It’s Clerval, his best friend.
- Go Big or Go Home: he used to run from the Creature; now he chases it across the ice.
Notice how they answer each other. What he wins in “Upside Down,” peace bought with a promise, is what he loses at “Rock Bottom.” And the decision at the start has its mirror at the end: he ran from the Creature the night it was born, and ends up chasing it to the end of the world.
The nested narrators leave a hint, too. Walton’s frame only needs three pieces: “Nothing to See Here,” “Go Big or Go Home” (he turns the ship around) and “Happily Ever After” (he goes home). Everything in between is listening. A frame is a story without the middle.
Now, honestly, what doesn’t fit
- “Upside Down” comes late. It lands past the 60% mark. The exact middle of the book belongs to the Creature, learning to talk by spying on the De Laceys. Its tale is a small novel with its own pieces, and that family’s rejection is its “Upside Down.”
- “That Wasn’t in the Plan” has no place of its own. What changes everything is someone turning up, the Creature, and it turns up at “No Turning Back”: Victor wanted something beautiful and got this. It’s one of the five flexible pieces, and here it rides along with another.
- “Now It All Makes Sense” lives in the frame. Feverish, Victor feels like the murderer of everyone he loves, and still he keeps quiet. He only really gets it when he tells Walton everything: the whole novel is his confession, the opposite of “keeping quiet is enough.”
- The fall teaches him nothing. In almost every novel, what your protagonist does at “Go Big or Go Home” answers what they lost at “Rock Bottom.” Not here: after Clerval, Victor gets married with pistols in his pockets, sure the threat is against him. It’s a tragedy, and the one who learns is Walton.
- “Now for the Fun Part” sounds ironic when the fun is William dying and Justine paying for it. Read it as “what we came to see,” and the irony suits the house.
One scene, taken apart
The blind old man, chapter 15:
- Goal: the Creature wants to win over old De Lacey, who can’t see it, before his children come home.
- Conflict: the clock. And what the others will see when they walk in.
- Outcome: no, and worse. Felix drives it out with a stick, the family leaves, and it burns the cottage down. That’s when it declares war on humankind.
It starts at the highest hope in the book and ends at the lowest: from + to −. The whole novel swings on that hinge.
What Checks would tell Mary Shelley
With the novel in Sunday Plot, Checks raises its hand: Walton vanishes from chapter 3 to chapter 12, and there are runs of six scenes in a row that end badly. Both are on purpose. Checks asks; you decide. Mary Shelley would have said “yes, thanks” and moved on.
For today
Pick a scene from your novel and ask who’s telling it, and to whom. Picturing a listener changes the tone: confessing isn’t the same as showing off.
In Sunday Plot, open the scene in the Outline and look at the “Narrator” field. If your novel has several voices, give each scene its own and check in Checks whether anyone disappears for too long. Sometimes it’s a mistake. Sometimes it’s Walton.