 This is Part 3, the last part of Lecture 6

 So, in Part 1 I talked about the narrator, narrative voice, and point of view.

 In Part 2 I went over how the third person objective perspective in Shirley Jackson’s “The

Lottery” makes that short story work so well.

 In this video, the last video for this lecture, I’m going to show you how Mary Shelley uses first

person perspective—and unreliable narration—in Chapter 5 of her novel, Frankenstein, which

is probably the most famous chapter or scene in that very famous novel.

 Most of you probably have a good idea about the story of Frankenstein, even if you haven’t read

the book.

 One thing that people get wrong is that the monster isn’t called Frankenstein; the monster is

nameless. Frankenstein is the name of the scientist who creates the monster, a guy called

Victor Frankenstein.

 The story, in brief, is about Victor and his determination to infuse life into dead matter. That’s

his mission. He finally manages to bring it about, but then he freaks out, disowns his creation,

and the rest of the novel details the aftermath of that. The monster starts to become self aware,

but he’s shunned by his creator and wider society, so be becomes angry and vengeful. He starts

to murder all of Victor Frankenstein’s family, including his wife, so the novel ends with Victor

chasing after the monster.

 There’s a lot you can learn from reading this novel. You can read its moral in various ways. I’ve

always taken it to be a novel about the dangers of experimental science. Victor spends his

whole life trying to design something, without really thinking about the consequences. Then,

when he finally creates it, he’s horrified, and it goes onto create horrendous trouble in the

world.

o For example, lots of people mention the invention of the atom bomb when they read

Frankenstein. Einstein and another scientist called Oppenheimer dedicated their time

and intelligence to creating the world’s most devastating weapon. But when

Oppenheimer watched the first tests of the weapon in the Nevada desert, he was

horrified. He’s quoted as saying that he has become the destroyer of worlds. He would

go on to see the bomb dropped on Japan and the absolute devastation that caused.

 Anyway, I asked you guys to read Chapter 5 of the novel, which is when the monster wakes up

for the first time. Victor has been spending his entire time, whole days and nights, trying to

bring his creation to life. He’s burnt out and frustrated. But then the creature opens its eyes.

Victor suddenly freaks out and runs away. His creation has become suddenly ugly and

terrifying to him. He wishes it gone and regrets everything he’s done. He actually suffers a

nervous breakdown at the end of the chapter.

 But what makes this chapter—and other chapters—interesting is Shelley’s use of first person

narration, and unreliable narration. We’re told this scene of the monster waking up through

the perspective of Victor, not the monster, so we’re given Victor’s perspective, which might not

be 100% reliable, because of his fears and prejudices.

 Okay, so I’ll go through the chapter, pausing to explain important aspects, especially when it

comes to how the narrative perspective of the chapter influences out reading experience.

 Okay, so Victor has been very hard to bring his creation to life. This creation has been

constructed out of the various body parts of recently executed criminals. He says: “With an

anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I

might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

 Then, in one of the best sentences in literature, Victor describes the creature’s eye opening: “It

was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the [window]panes, and my

candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull

yellow eye of the creature open.”

o Can we just take a moment to appreciate Shelley’s writing here? First of all, she

creatures such a great atmosphere for this scene: it’s midnight, the rain is pouring

outside and pattering “dismally against the panes.” It’s dark and moody and spooky.

o She also uses setting as a metaphor here. The setting is being compared to the state of

Victor’s psyche. Remember that Victor has been working flat out. He’s tired, he’s

exhausted, and mentally fatigued. He’s burnt out. The setting echoes this: the rain is

described as dismal, his candle—like him—is nearly burnt out and it’s light, like his

enthusiasm, is half-extinguished. It’s great writing.

 He goes through a bit of an emotional rollercoaster when the creature wakes up. Before it

woke, he thought the creature would be beautiful. He had carefully selected his features as

beautiful: flowing black hair, pearly white teeth, a muscular build. But then when the monster

actually starts to wake up, and he sees it move, his attitude changes, and he calls it a

“catastrophe.” He’s disgusted by it.

o He feels or experiences what the famous psychologist and cocaine-addict, Sigmund

Freud, called the uncanny. The uncanny is something that looks familiar to us, like

another human, but at the same time our brains and our instincts noticed something

strange about it, so it makes us react with fear and revulsion.

o Like when we see a wax statue of someone. It looks real but our brains know it’s not real,

and that conflict creates an sensation of unease within us. Same thing when we see

human-looking androids move and talk. We think: huh, it looks human. But then it will

move in a weird way, like a weird head movement, and all of a sudden our brain’s like:

HELL NO! That’s ain’t real. Kill it with fire. Anyway, that’s the uncanny: something that

seems familiar but is also strange and disconcerting.

o Victor experiences that when the monster wakes. He thought it’d be beautiful and

human, but it’s not. It’s monstrous. “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 of 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 of the same color as the dun-white sockets in which

they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips.”

o So that’s terrifying.
 Victor makes the sudden change he feels emotionally very clear. He once only thought of his

creation as beautiful, but now he sees it as nothing by monstrous.

o He says: “The different accidents of life _____heart”

 So Victor runs away from his creation. He goes to his room and they falls asleep due to all the

chaos and turmoil and emotional exhaustion. While asleep, though, he has some terrible

dreams. He dreams, for example, that he meets his fiancé, Elizabeth, in the streets, but as he

goes to embrace and kiss her, she turns into the corpse of his dead mother.

o That’s a freaky ass dream. But it’s also an example of foreshadowing, as the creature that

he’s created will go on to murder many of Victor’s friends and loved ones.

 To make things even worse, he wakes up from that dream, only to find the creature standing

over his bed, which freaks Victor out, and he escapes out into the streets, and that’s how the

rest of the chapter plays out.

 But it’s how Victor describes his encounter with his creation as it’s standing over his bed that I

want to concentrate on. We read this scene through the first person perspective of Victor. That

means we read and understand what’s going on only through his eyes. We’re not given an

insight into the monster’s thoughts and feelings at all, so everything is explained to us through

Victor, and that influences how we read the scene.

 Okay, so let me read this section out, and then I’ll go over it a little.

o “I started from my sleep_____given life.”

 Okay, so we’re given this scene, as I’ve said, exclusively through Victor’s perspective. Now,

remember: Victor is feeling some very powerful feelings about his creation. He once thought it

would be beautiful, but then the creature woke up and moved, and Victor now thinks of it as

ugly and monstrous. And it’s those prejudices of Victor’s that influence how he describes the

creature to us. He characterizes the creature in a certain way that influences how we, too, read

and understand the monster. But we must also keep in mind that what Victor is saying is

biased and possibly flawed. He hates the creature, so he will describe him in a hateful way,

which may or may not be accurate. Victor, then, is an unreliable narrator, because how he

describes the creatures is not accurate; it’s influenced by his own fears and prejudices.

 For example, he describes his creation as a “wretch,” a “miserable monster,” and a “demoniacal

corpse.” The creature he’s created is made out of human parts, and it moves, and it can think,

and it can talk. But Victor instantly dehumanizes and shuns his creation by calling it a monster.

And we, the readers, start seeing the creature as monstrous, too, because we’re being told how

to see it through Victor’s prejudiced perspective.

 This dehumanization also occurs when he describes the creature’s features. He says, for

example, that the creature has eyes, “if eyes they may be called.” What the hell does that mean?

If eyes they may be called? Well, if they’re not eyes, what are they? They are the eyes of a dead

human, so they ARE eyes. But Victor is projecting his terror onto the creature’s features and

making it seem monstrous, thus influencing how we see the creature, too.
 He also refers to the creature’s mouth as his jaws. The word mouth has a human connotation;

we refer to each other’s mouths. We don’t refer to each other’s jaws. We do, however, describe

the mouths of animal predators as jaws. A whole movie franchise was made out of the

monstrous connotation of that word. So, again, Victor is trying to paint the creature in a

monstrous way.

 Same thing when Victor says the creature grins at him. His jaws opened and he grins at Victor

menacingly. At least that’s how we see things through Victor’s perspective. What if the creature

is standing over his bed because he wants to meet his creator? What if this supposedly evil grin

is an attempt at a smile? Victor doesn’t think of that; he just assumes the creature’s movements

and features are evil and threatening.

 Victor also freaks out when the creature reaches out to him. He says: “one hand was stretched

out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs.” It’s the phrase “seemingly

to detain me” that you should concentrate on. That is a VERY telling statement. Seemingly to

detain me. So, in other words, Victor doesn’t know the truth of the creature’s motives; he just

instantly projects his fears and prejudices onto the creature’s motivations. Maybe the creature

is smiling and reaching out to embrace his creator, his father? In other words, the creature,

who can’t speak yet, like a baby, is holding out his arms to embrace Victor. He’s saying:

“Daddy! I love you!” But Victor, seeing how horrible the creature looks, just sees it as

monstrous and its movements and motivations as monstrous and threatening. So he denies his

creation and characterizes it and dehumanizes it as monstrous.

 In other words, then, we are told this encounter through the perspective of Victor, not the

creature, so we only get Victor’s perspective, and that perspective is unreliable, because it’s

clouded by Victor’s fears and prejudices and so on.

 It reminds me of a social experiment that a guy did a few years ago. He’s black, over 6ft. And he

dressed in a way that people associated with being a thug or gangbanger. Anyway, he put a

camera up in a lift or elevator and recorded the reaction of people as they got on with him. 9

times out of 10 the person—usually a white person—would instantly go to the other side of the

elevator and look terrified, as if they think this guy is going to rob or attack him. The point of

the experiment is to prove that we judge each other—as well as other things in the world—by

how they appear on the outside. This guy looks like a thug, and the media has done a very good

job painting associations of thugs and violence in our heads, so people will look at them and

react to them with fear and skepticism. It’s the same thing with victor and his creation: the

creature looks a certain way, so Victor thinks the creature is as evil or monstrous as it looks. We

don’t see things from the creature’s point of view at all.

 I think, then, that Shelley uses first person perspective in this chapter—and other chapters in

the novel—for two reasons: 1) it creates great suspense, because we think it’s an encounter

between man and monster, but 2) she also does it to show how our own personal prejudices

and perspectives can influence how we see and understand things. Victor’s description of the

creature is ultimately unreliable.

 So here’s a challenge for you guys. It’s a voluntary challenge. If you do it, and you do a good job

of it, then you can get an extra 5% added to your final grade. If you want to, then, you can

rewrite the scene of the Victor’s encounter with the creature in his bed from the creature’s first-

person perspective. So tell the scene from the creature’s perspective, not Victor’s.

 Okay, that’s it for this lecture. Remember that you have a quiz at 1oam on Friday. The next

lecture, on symbolism, will be uploaded on Monday, and remember, too, that you have a

midterm next week, Friday, May 29, which will be on the content of the lectures so far.