Frankenstein; or, the modern prometheus

Frankenstein: Condensed Narrative

Frankenstein spoke with fury shaping his every feeling. Revenge alone kept him alive and calculating; without it, delirium or death would have been his portion. His first resolution was to quit Geneva forever. His beloved country now felt hateful in his adversity. Taking his mother’s jewels and a sum of money, he departed into a wandering that was to end only with his life.

He traversed vast deserts and endured every hardship known to travelers in barbarous lands. Often he stretched his failing limbs upon the sandy plain and prayed for death, but revenge would not permit him to die and leave his adversary in being.

His first labor was to find some clue by which he might track his fiendish enemy. As night approached, he found himself at the entrance of the cemetery where William, Elizabeth, and his father reposed. He knelt on the grass and kissed the earth. “By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear to pursue the dæmon who caused this misery until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.”

A loud and fiendish laugh answered him through the stillness of night. A well-known and abhorred voice whispered close to his ear: “I am satisfied, miserable wretch! You have determined to live, and I am satisfied.” The broad disk of the moon arose and shone full upon the ghastly and distorted shape fleeing with more than mortal speed.

Frankenstein pursued him for many months. He followed the windings of the Rhone in vain; then by strange chance saw the fiend enter a vessel bound for the Black Sea. He took passage in the same ship, but the monster escaped. Through the wilds of Tartary and Russia he tracked him, sometimes guided by terrified peasants, sometimes by marks the creature himself left behind upon the bark of trees or cut in stone. One inscription read: “My reign is not yet over… Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost.”

Through increasing cold the snows thickened. He procured a sledge and dogs and traversed the snows with inconceivable speed, daily gaining on his foe. At a wretched hamlet on the seashore, the inhabitants told him a gigantic monster armed with a gun had arrived the night before, seized a drove of trained dogs, and fled across the sea in a direction that led to no land. Frankenstein exchanged his land-sledge for one fashioned for the inequalities of the Frozen Ocean and departed from land.

For three weeks he endured misery. Mountains of ice barred his passage; the thunder of the ground sea threatened destruction. Once, from the summit of a sloping ice mountain where one of his dogs had fallen dead, he caught sight of a dark speck on the dusky plain—a sledge carrying the distorted proportions of a well-known form. Hope gushed back into his heart; warm tears filled his eyes. He gained on it, and when after nearly two days’ journey the enemy was but a mile distant, his heart bounded within him.

Then a ground sea split the ice with a tremendous and overwhelming sound. A tumultuous sea rolled between him and his enemy; he was left drifting on a scattered piece of ice that was continually lessening, preparing for him a hideous death. Several dogs died. When his strength was nearly spent, he saw Walton’s vessel riding at anchor. He destroyed part of his sledge to construct oars and moved his ice raft toward the ship. He had determined, if the vessel went southwards, still to trust himself to the mercy of the seas rather than abandon his purpose. It went northwards, and he was taken aboard when his vigor was exhausted.

“Swear to me, Walton,” he pleaded, “that he shall not escape, that you will seek him and satisfy my vengeance in his death.” But he was not so selfish as to demand it. Still he warned: “Trust him not. His soul is as hellish as his form, full of treachery and fiend-like malice. Hear him not; call on the names of William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth, my father, and of the wretched Victor, and thrust your sword into his heart. I will hover near and direct the steel aright.”

Walton, in continuation.

August 26th, 17—.

You have read this strange and terrific story, Margaret; and do you not feel your blood congeal with horror? Sometimes, seized with sudden agony, Frankenstein could not continue his tale; at others, his broken yet piercing voice uttered words so replete with anguish. His fine and lovely eyes were now lighted up with indignation, now subdued to downcast sorrow. The letters of Felix and Safie, which he showed me, and the apparition of the monster seen from our ship, brought me greater conviction than his asseverations.

Frankenstein discovered I had taken notes concerning his history. He corrected and augmented them in many places. “Since you have preserved my narration,” said he, “I would not that a mutilated one should go down to posterity.”

On every point of general literature he displays unbounded knowledge. His eloquence is forcible and touching. “When younger,” said he, “I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. My feelings were profound, but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. By the union of vivid imagination and intense powers of analysis I conceived and executed the creation of a man. But this thought, which supported me in the commencement of my career, now serves only to plunge me lower in the dust. Like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell. From my infancy I was imbued with high hopes and a lofty ambition; but how am I sunk!”

My beloved Sister, September 2d.

I write encompassed by peril, ignorant whether I am doomed to see dear England again. Mountains of ice admit of no escape and threaten every moment to crush my vessel. My brave fellows look towards me for aid, but I have none to bestow. It is terrible to reflect that the lives of all these men are endangered through me.

My unfortunate guest regards me with the tenderest compassion. He reminds me how often the same accidents have befallen other navigators; even the sailors feel the power of his eloquence, and while they hear his voice they believe these vast mountains of ice are mole-hills which will vanish before the resolutions of man.

September 5th.

Frankenstein has daily declined in health. This morning half a dozen of the sailors demanded admission into the cabin. Their leader told me they feared that if the ice should dissipate I should be rash enough to continue my voyage and lead them into fresh dangers. They insisted I should engage with a solemn promise to direct my course southwards if set free.