Frankenstein is Mary Shelley's masterpiece. The rich combination of beautiful setting, bone-chilling circumstances, and moral conflict make the tale truly an original. Yet the creature which Frankenstein created is not the most frightening part of this tale. It is the truth of humanity that Mary Shelley brings to light. That too often we cannot see past somebody’s appearance.

The beginning of the book starts with a young captain, writing letters to his sister. He is on a voyage to reach the north pole, and along the way encounters a man who is stranded on an ice raft. Then the story comes into play as if the man, Frankenstein is the one telling the story to the captain and the captain is the one writing it down. It gives the reader a unique view, simultaneously feeling as if they are both in a ship’s cabin, listening to the tale by candlelight, and with Frankenstein as he wallows in his self-pity. We travel with Frankenstein to his school in Germany, we are there when he becomes obsessed with playing god. We are yelling at him to stop to think about the consequences of his experiment, and claim “I told you so” when he is frightened by his own creation.

And we are there with the creature, whom has no name, in his suffering. Unjustly hated, and turned away from by the very man who built him, he feels as fiercely as any human. He longs for a friend, companionship, yet his appearance casts him away from nearly every chance of obtaining this. He helps and grows to love a small family, though they are unaware of it. His first attempt at speaking with them, or more specifically the old blind father, he is promised that he could be helped, yet when the rest of the family returns he is turned upon and chased away. This is a pain that fills him with bitterness and rage.   And these negative emotions are ignited into a fury when he rescues a young girl from a river and the girl’s father -unaware of what he had done and frightened by his appearance. He views humanity of incapable of caring for anybody that is unlike them, unable to see past an outwards impression. The pain he feels causes him to hate his creator. He never asked to be made, and Frankenstein turned upon him, why should he care about him? Yet he does see that Frankenstein has a use.

Frankenstein, suffering the loss of his younger brother at the hands of his creation, is appalled by the idea of making it a companion as the creation asks. Yet, for the sake of his family and dear friend he begins to craft one. Until the guilt and the worry weighs heavily on him. Worry that the female would be crueler and fiercer than the first. That soon a whole race of these “demons” would inhabit the Earth alongside his people. He stops his work and destroys the partially built female. In doing so he angers his original creation and causes the death of his dearest friend. And when his wife is also murdered, he swears that the creature will die at his hand, that he will hunt it to the ends of the earth and back in an attempt to right the wrong he believes he has set loose upon the world.

Mary Shelley brings the story back to the beginning. Back to the sea captain hearing the tale of the man, whom we know to be Frankenstein, who had been found adrift. An excellent use of letters in that it seems as if this story was one you had received in the mail, intended only for you. This tale is one that strikes with the truth of humanity. We have this idea that the creature is a monster, when the true monster was the scientist. We believe that it is all the creations fault when if the creator had simply faced that he had brought something to life and now was responsible for it and not run off, the whole story could have been avoided. The story of Frankenstein is one of how we all wish to pass the blame upon another instead of facing that we messed up. It also speaks of the importance of stopping to think before we act so that we might avoid the poor and sometimes terrible results.