Many voices, one story: Frankenstein

Imagem: dragoart.com

Frankenstein is an early Victorian novel published anonymously in 1818. Only in 1831, in a second edition, the author’s name appeared, Mary Shelley (1797-1851). We may suppose, by this fact, that her voice had difficulties to be heard in the European context in the beggining of XIX century. 

Taking into account the social and political agitation of the period, we are able to identify different voices in her literary discourse. In terms of Literature, she openly expresses the influence of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John William Polidori, aside from references as John Milton and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In terms of Science and Philosophy, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft can be easily identified. The narrative style also dialogues with science fiction and the gothic novel style, providing the book a substantial richness and peculiarity among the Romantic literature.

The focus of this text are the internal voices presented in the novel by three narrators. Each one has its own language style, conflicts and isolation. This option reflects a literary device that offers the narrative a consistent variation of points of view.

By the plot, which is constructed around the creation and development of a being in the likeness of a man, the author discusses the validity of the atemporal political, social, religious, moral and scientific ideas of our society. Amongst many subjects, we can start reflecting upon the dichotomies: the evil/good essence; emotion/rationality; the instinct of surviving/the pain of being alive; the meaning of the existence/the transience of life; the beginning/the end; the creation/the creator; the consciousness/ the recklessness of people's acts; the desire for answers/the unanswered subjects; and, as ultimate, the nature of our society’s nature.

Frankenstein is a non-human-being who thinks deeply about the essence of humanity. He brings into doubt our faith and our rationality as humans. He discusses and asks for a logical organization of the system created by the society. Apart the reflexive part, the story itself exemplifies the result of a decision-making, putting side to side words and actions. Life is, in short, an experiment whose outcome is presented and discussed in details.

Narration, as concept part of a theory of literature, holds notions such as perspective, focus, objectivity/subjectivity, omniscience, unreliability, flipping, irregularity/continuity, neutrality or “over the shoulder narration[1]”, in a number of different theoretical approaches.

Despite the division made by the Structuralist Theory, which has its origins since the Poetics, we can divide the narrative text in two parts: a story, that is, the content, the events presented plus “what may be called the existents (characters, items of setting)” (Chatman, 1978), and a discourse, i.e., the way the content is expressed.

The book is structurally divided into 24 small chapters, but another possibility is to divide the novel into three long parts, according to the narrative process or the discourse. The first narrative: the character Robert Walton starts telling the story by letters. The second narrative: Victor Frankenstein orally exposes his point of view, and the third narrative: the creature tells his previous story. They are all homodiegetic narrators or character-narrators (Genette, 1980, apud O’Neill, 1994), since they play a greater or lesser role in the narrative reality presented.

Most of the narration is told by a protagonist character-narrator, in the way they play the main character in their own story. It is not a chronological narrative, and the events are exposed by digressions. Each character presents a portion of the story and apprises a specific lengthening of time.

As we can perceive, the narrative style is complex and flexible. The reader has to be able to follow the interruptions in the discourse, in which one narrator anticipates facts, breaks off the other or is addressed by the other narrator: “you can not understand me”, “my fellow”, “I am telling you my story”. An interesting point is that all the narrators are inside a dialogue: Walton/his sister, Walton/Victor Frankenstein, Creature/Creator, Frankenstein/Walton; nevertheless, the other ones are in the umbrella of the epistolary dialogue between Robert Walton and his sister. In fact, it is not a dialogue in the proper sense of the term (interaction), since the exchange of letters is implicit by the speech of Walton, in the way we only get in contact with his voice.

The letters make reference to events, thoughts and emotions, where a report is inside another. They can be understood as not just media but as the proof of the truthfulness of the events presented. The epistolary discourse also encloses the effect of putting time in an inferior perspective. However, time has different dimensions in the discourse and in the story. The discourse comprises a period of the conception of a life; the fictional universe is constructed in such a way we have the possibility to follow the development, the progress of a being. Therefore, we have the possibility to identify ourselves with the antagonist and the protagonist at the same time; the difficulty, then, is to identify who is each one in the story, since the focus is directed towards the suffering of the creature, even though the title of the book and the structure of the story directs to the creator.

About language style, we also observe that the language used by all the narrators differs from their actions. Walton presents himself and his sister in a dynamic and vivid way, full of adjectives and descriptions. The creator/creature contrast their speech and acts. Victor Frankenstein would represent the rational one, but his language is totally emotional. The emotional being, the creature, has the most rational speech and thought.

We may finally think that, by the form of telling a story, we have the capability of creating different stories.

References

CHATMAN, Seymoure. Narrative structure in fiction and film. Cornell University press, London, 1978.

O’Neill, Patrick. Fictions of discourse, reading narrative theory. University of Toronto press, London, 1994.

Shelley, Marry. Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus. Pinguin books, London, 1994.

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[1] The term is from a discussion on literary devices in terms of narration available at http://www.online-literature.com/. 

obs: texto adaptado de texto entregue para disciplina na Faculdade de Letras.