For Monday: Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume I (Chapters 1-7)

NOTE: If you have a different edition, read the first seven chapters, to the end of Volume (or Book) One. 

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: Most first-time readers of Frankenstein are surprised to find that the novel begins with a frame narrative: that of Walton, the arctic explorer, who is writing home to his sister, Mrs. Saville. What purpose does this frame serve, especially since it could have all been narrated from Victor’s point of view? Also, why is a narrator like Walton a horror-story (or Gothic story) convention even in films today? 

Q2: According to the story of his early education that Victor gives to Walton, what set him on the path of creating new life? How did he go from an earnest, naive young man to a “modern Prometheus” who would “pour a torrent of light into our dark world”?

Q3: Immediately after he creates his “monster,” Victor ends up falling asleep and has a nightmare of Elizabeth, where as soon as he kisses her, “her lips...became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms." How might the dream relate to his creation? Why is he tormented by visions of dead women?

Q4:Is Victor telling his story to Walton as a warning--a kind of "don't follow my example" story? Or does he want Walton to record his greatness for posterity? Consider the passage in Chapter Four when he writes, "if this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed."