Name: Andrew Nguyen, Dereck Grijalva, Vivian Nguyen

Date: September 19th, 2019

Class: Period 7

Frankenstein Notes

Vocab and Notes:

● Denotation: The explicit or direct meaning of a word or phrase. Essentially the actual

meaning of the word.

● Connotation: The associated or secondary meaning of a word or phrase. Essentially the

emotional meaning of the word (can vary depending on many certain perspectives).

● Nature:

- Denotation: The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants,

animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to

humans or human creations.

- Connotation: nature good. Nature is relaxing and helps to bring feelings of peace

and comfort.

● Mechanistic:

- Denotation: Relating to theories which explain phenomena in purely physical or

deterministic (Relating to the philosophical doctrine that all events, including

human action, are ultimately determined by causes regarded as external to the

will) terms.

- Connotation: technology bad. Man made things like technology and giant

monsters can derive the unsettling fears in humans because of its unnaturality.

- Mechanistic View:
Quotes:

● “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom

with such infinite poems and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in

proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!- Great God! His yellow

skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous

black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a

more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun

white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

- Chapter 5, Pg. 47

● The Denotative Meaning of Mechanistic: Relating to theories which explain phenomena

in purely physical or deterministic terms. (Deterministic: Relating to the philosophical

doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes

regarded as external to the will)

● The Denotative Meaning of Nature: The physical world collectively, including plants,

animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to

humans or human creations.

● Gives us a descriptive idea of how the monster looks like. Seems to be similar to the idea

of a compare and contrast between Nature vs. Mechanistic, the Good and the Bad.

● Victor Frankenstein begins to describe the monster he created, where we can see how he

created a “natural” human through the mechanistic means of the human body.

● I expected this reception,” said the demon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I
 be hated, whom am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, me creator, detest and

spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the

annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do

your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind.

- Chapter 10, Pg. 81

● “They were dead, and I lived; their murderer also lived, and to destroy him I must drag

out my weary existence, I knelt on the grass and kissed the earth and with quivering lips

exclaimed, “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; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that

preside over thee, to pursue the demon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish

in mortal conflict.” Chapter 24, Pg. 180