STUDY GUIDE · MARY SHELLEY · 1818, REVISED 1831
Frankenstein,
told three times over.
The novel is a story inside a story inside a story. These questions follow each narrator in turn and ask you to support your answer with the text.
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About 4 h 50 min to read. Reading time for each part →
- AUTHOR
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- FIRST PUBLISHED
- 1818; revised edition 1831
- TEXT USED HERE
- Project Gutenberg eBook #84
How to use this guide
Spoilers ahead: the overview, character notes, and themes discuss the ending. If you are still reading, go straight to the chapter questions and stop at the chapters you have finished.
Choose one question, answer in your own words, and find a short passage that supports your claim. Explain how the wording supports it, then look for a detail that complicates your answer. Use the essay exercise after finishing the novel.
Check which text you have.
Shelley revised Frankenstein for its 1831 edition. The Project Gutenberg text quoted here, and the one Parlor opens, follows that revision: it has four letters and 24 chapters, and Elizabeth is an orphan adopted by Victor’s parents. In the 1818 text she is Victor’s cousin, and chapter numbers are counted differently. If your class uses the 1818 text, find the passage by its words rather than its chapter number.
Who is telling you this?
The creature’s central account reaches you through Victor, whose story reaches you through Walton’s letters. At the end, Walton hears the creature directly. Keep asking who is speaking, to whom, and what they want the listener to believe.
- Robert Walton
- Letters 1–4 and the close of Chapter 24. An explorer writes to his sister Margaret from a ship bound for the North Pole, where he takes an exhausted stranger aboard.
- Victor Frankenstein
- Chapters 1–10 and 17–24. Victor tells Walton his life, meaning it as a warning.
- The creature
- Chapters 11–16. Spoken to Victor in the mountains, and repeated by Victor to Walton.
The story in brief
Victor Frankenstein discovers how to animate lifeless matter, but abandons the being he creates. Left to educate himself, the creature learns language and affection by observing a family who cannot accept him when he appears before them. His appeal for companionship becomes a demand on the creator who refuses to care for him.
After William’s murder and Justine’s execution, Victor hears the creature’s account and agrees to make him a companion. He destroys the unfinished second creature, fearing what the pair might do. The creature kills Henry Clerval and Elizabeth; Victor pursues him north until Walton’s expedition finds him. Victor dies aboard the ship. The creature speaks to Walton over his maker’s body and announces his intention to die, but Walton does not witness that death.
Characters and relationships
- Victor and the creature
- A creator seeking glory and a creation seeking recognition. Both narrate their suffering persuasively; neither account erases the harm they cause.
- Walton and Margaret
- The explorer and the sister receiving his letters. Walton’s ambition resembles Victor’s, but his crew gives him a practical test: will he sacrifice others to continue?
- Elizabeth and Henry
- Victor’s future wife and his closest friend. Their care offers an alternative to his isolation, yet his secrecy leaves them exposed to dangers they cannot understand.
- William and Justine
- Victor’s youngest brother and the young woman wrongly convicted of killing him. Their deaths make the consequences of Victor’s private experiment public.
- The De Lacey family
- The cottagers whose daily lives educate the creature. The blind father listens to him; the returning family responds to his appearance with fear and violence.
Themes to test against the text
Creation and responsibility
Victor imagines gratitude before he imagines care. Compare his expectations in Chapter 4 with his flight in Chapter 5 and the creature’s demand in Chapter 17. Does creating life establish an obligation even when the result frightens him?
Education and exclusion
Language gives the creature access to human feeling, history, and injustice without giving him a place among people. Chapters 13–16 let you test whether education comforts him, intensifies his isolation, or does both.
Sympathy and accountability
The creature’s account explains how he becomes violent, but explanation need not amount to excuse. Read his description of William’s murder in Chapter 16 beside his final speech to Walton. Notice where he accepts responsibility and where he assigns it elsewhere.
Walton’s letters
LETTERS 1–4
What does Walton want from his voyage, and what does he say he lacks? In Letter 2 he writes, “I have no friend, Margaret.” How does that wish prepare you for the stranger he takes aboard?
Look at: Letter 2; the stranger’s arrival in Letter 4.Victor tells Walton, “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.” What does Victor believe the two men share? Do you agree after reading Walton’s letters?
Look at: Letter 4.Why might Shelley open with a stranger’s letters instead of with Victor himself? Name one thing the frame lets the novel do that a single narrator could not.
Victor’s education and the creation
CHAPTERS 1–5
Victor describes a nearly ideal childhood, then singles out moments he treats as the causes of his later ruin. Which moments does he choose? Do you accept his account of cause and effect, or does it excuse him?
Look at: Chapter 2, his reading of Cornelius Agrippa and his father’s response.Before the creature exists, Victor imagines that “A new species would bless me as its creator and source.” What does he expect to receive from it? Compare that expectation with what he does on the night it wakes.
Look at: Chapter 4, then Chapter 5.“His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God!” What changes between Victor’s plan and the result: the creature, or the way Victor sees it?
Look at: Chapter 5.Victor interrupts his story to warn Walton: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.” Is the novel’s warning really about knowledge? Consider ambition, secrecy, and responsibility as alternatives, and choose the one the text best supports.
Look at: Chapter 4.
Consequences
CHAPTERS 6–10
Justine is tried for William’s murder. Victor believes he knows who killed William and says nothing. What reasons does he give for his silence, and how do you judge them?
Look at: Chapters 7 and 8.In the mountains, the creature tells Victor, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” What does each comparison say about his relationship to Victor? Why might he reach for Milton’s story rather than his own words?
Look at: Chapter 10.“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” Before you read the creature’s story, write down what evidence would convince you this is true. Check your list when you reach Chapter 16.
Look at: Chapter 10.
The creature’s story
CHAPTERS 11–16
The creature learns speech by watching the cottagers through a chink in the wall of his hovel. What does he learn about people from them before he ever speaks to one?
Look at: Chapters 11–13.He finds three books: Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and The Sorrows of Werter. Choose one and explain how it shapes the way he understands himself.
Look at: Chapter 15.After reading Victor’s journal, he cries, “Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” What exactly does he blame Victor for: making him, or turning away from him?
Look at: Chapter 15.Where does the creature’s account ask you for sympathy, and where does it ask you to excuse something he has done? Are those the same request?
Look at: Chapter 16.
The bargain and its end
CHAPTERS 17–24
The creature demands a companion and argues, “I am malicious because I am miserable.” Why does Victor agree? Why does he later destroy the companion he has begun? Is his reasoning sound both times?
Look at: Chapter 17 and Chapter 20.“I shall be with you on your wedding-night.” Victor is sure the threat is aimed at his own life. What does that certainty reveal about him?
Look at: Chapter 20; Chapter 22.By the last chapters, maker and creature are pursuing each other across the ice. In what ways have they become alike?
Look at: Chapter 24.Dying, Victor tells Walton to “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition,” then adds, “Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” What does Walton decide? Does the ending endorse Victor’s advice or his doubt?
Look at: Chapter 24, Walton’s final letters.
Across the whole novel
FOR ESSAYS AND FINAL DISCUSSIONS
The being Victor makes is never given a name. Track the words used for him: creature, wretch, dæmon, fiend, monster. Who uses which word, and when does the choice change?
Is Frankenstein a story about science? Build the case using two passages, then build the case against using two others.
Which of the three narrators do you trust most? Point to the moment in the text that earns or loses that trust.
TRY IT HERE · NO ACCOUNT NEEDED
The moment the dream ends.
From Chapter 5, Project Gutenberg eBook #84. The example answers are editorial, written for this guide.
I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.
Before you look at the example answer
- According to Victor, what changes at the moment he finishes?
- What does the phrase “the beauty of the dream” suggest about what he had been working toward?
- What has the creature done by this point in the scene? What does the passage leave out?
See one possible interpretation
Victor places the change in his own mind: “the beauty of the dream vanished.” The dream was his, and so was the beauty. By this point the creature has only opened its eye and moved; Victor’s horror arrives before it has harmed anyone. The passage suggests that the rejection starts with its maker, and that Victor was in love with the idea of the work rather than with what it would produce.
The passage does not settle whether his horror is unjust. He also describes a real physical shock, and a reader could argue that no one would react calmly. A careful reading keeps both possibilities in view.
Compare a claim with a supported explanation
A claim that needs more support: “The creature is evil from the moment it wakes.” Nothing in this passage describes the creature acting, let alone acting with ill will.
A more supported explanation: “Victor’s disgust comes before the creature has harmed anyone, so the novel’s first rejection belongs to its creator.” This rests on the order of events and on Victor’s own words about his dream.
These are examples, not scores. Other interpretations can be reasonable when the passage supports them.
Build an essay: does Walton escape Victor’s mistake?
Compare Letter 2 with the crew’s demand to turn home in Chapter 24. Write a provisional claim about whether Walton changes, then test it against his continued admiration for Victor. Use one passage for the similarity, one for the different decision, and one that complicates your conclusion. Returning home is evidence of a choice; it is not by itself proof that ambition has disappeared.
READ IT WITH SOMEONE TO TALK TO
Discuss Frankenstein in Parlor.
Parlor Study has the full Project Gutenberg text. Read a chapter, then open Discuss to talk through a question from this guide, or use Challenge me for a new question about your reading. Open the chapter you’re on first: the discussion covers only what you’ve reached. Check AI responses against the book.
Parlor Study is a web preview for ages 13 and up, available by invitation. Request an invitation. AI feedback can make mistakes; check it against the text.
About this guide
Quotations come from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, Project Gutenberg eBook #84, which is in the public domain in the United States. The questions and example answers were written for Parlor Study by Nevel Trade Inc.
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