It's Alive, well not quite...

Where was the monster, the mad scientist, Igor, the tower conjuring up lightning and the darkness associated with a scientist thinking he could be God? Reading Frankenstein left me feeling sympathy for the creature and the scientist than fear. I went into the book thinking I was going to be shocked and scared and was more surprised to feel a sense of remorse for the characters. Everyone in the novels seems to have been caught up in an unfortunate fate. Science in this novel seems to play a role that can lead you to obsessed madness, and an ill fate. It can burden you with responsibility over your discoveries and creations. As I read the book I was more reminded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude than a menacing science fiction novel. In Marquez's novel a sleepy town is plagued by technological advances, science instead of signifying a positive move towards modernity exists as a troublesome issue. Marquez even has a family member go mad in his own office trying to prove that by using theories in Alchemy he could turn stone and metals into gold. He let science and all its burden take over his life the same way Victor Frankenstein did. This association with Marquez's novel is one I didn't expect to see. The novel angel is also one that makes the text more real and feeling. The story isn't told from a all knowing narrator but mainly from Victor Frankenstein himself, a man grief stricken, alone and changed by one monster, his monster.

Victor seems to have fallen victim to the passion of glory and knowledge, to his own ingeniousness and discoveries. His scientific creation seems to be the burden that destroys all his happiness, the murders of his family and the grief related death of his father rest on his shoulders as the creator of the monster. At the same time one can fully be upset or angry at the monster, who is equally plagued by his monstrosity and seemingly destined solitude because of it. This kind of negative turn science takes in the novel is one that can be applied to our world now. Reading this book let me to think more about how many "monsters" have been released through the discovery of certain sciences. To think of the ozone layer disappearing, how we are destroying the worlds resources, how certain species are going extinct. Have we also created our own monsters. With the efforts to go green publicly I can only think of Victor Frankenstein and for the remorse he felt, and is going green our remorse for our monster. It seems that this association with science as a curse and a gift is one that can be applied to the world outside of Mary Shelly's world. How many monsters have we created, how many monsters have been let loose and are now getting their revenge on us?