THE MURDERS HAVE BEGUN in our Frankenstein readalong, and I have to admit that I was not expecting quite such a rapid onset of murder and mayhem. “Rapid” in terms of how much of the book has elapsed so far, not rapid in terms of how much time has elapsed. As I may have mentioned in my last anger-post about horrible Victor Frankenstein and his horrible decision-making process, he legitimately just lets the chips fall where they may w/r/t the ten-foot-tall monster he’s made. Like he makes this monster, the monster gets away, and then two years go by.
Chapter 6, in any case, starts with a bang, or rather with a murder: Frankenstein gets a letter to tell him that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered. Not only that, but when he returns home to comfort his family in their time of grief, he learns that their servant Justine — a close friend of Elizabeth’s! — is believed to be the killer. But Elizabeth doesn’t buy it, and neither does Victor: He’s sure the true killer has to be the creature he abandoned. He feels bad about it, but not bad enough to try to clear Justine’s name or take any action that might prevent the creature from killing again. He just sits around while Justine is hanged for murder. Cool.
After Justine is gone, Victor continues to make things all about him, such that both his father — who lost a son — and Elizabeth — who lost a brother — have to try to comfort him. Victor is a garbage person who deserves to be torn to pieces by the monster, but based on his heavy foreshadowing and the annotations about Jung, I suspect this won’t be what happens.
Um, I wrote that, and then I remembered that can’t be what happens because Victor is telling this story to us now and thus has to have survived it. Well! I hope that after this story is over, we hear back from our good old totally straight pal Robert Walton that the creature catches up to them and shanks Frankenstein.
On a mopey lonesome trip up a mountain, Frankenstein meets his creature face to face. He tries to fight it for killing little William, but the creature is vastly his physical superior, so that doesn’t work out. The narration doesn’t specifically say that the creature put its palm flat on Frankenstein’s forehead and held him at arm’s length while Frankenstein windmilled his arms, but I have to assume that’s what went down.
The creature’s like “Yes, I know I killed your brother, but I still need a favor from you. Hear me out.” Two months after killing someone’s brother is not a great time to ask someone for a favor, but I get that the creature’s new to this world and doesn’t know how things work yet. Frankenstein agrees to hear him out, and the creature begins telling a story of how he learned what humans were and how fire works. By happy coincidence, he ended up in a hut that abutted another hut (or something — I wasn’t super interested in the geography of this arrangement so I didn’t pay attention to it) in which lived a super nice family. The son has an Arab girlfriend who comes to stay, and as they’re teaching her to speak French, the creature learns to speak French too.
The section ends here. I am getting a terrible premonition that the creature is going to fall in love with Agatha — the beautiful and virtuous daughter in the family the creature lives next door to — and that we’re going to discover he’s turned to Murder as a result of her spurning him. That better not be what the plot turns out to be. I am in NO MOOD.
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