Five years ago yesterday, having finished reading it for the first time, I wrote:
“Is it too depressing to realize that the one literary character you most relate to is in fact Frankenstein’s monster?”
And I feel this connection even more strongly today, both in how I feel about my own place in society and in how I’ve come to accept what I truly believe about the existence of a god and the meaning/non-meaning of life & I see it mirrored in the monster’s anguished cries: why would you create me only to have me live in such misery? As Peter Buck is wont to say, “what kind of preacher are you, not to see if you can save my soul?” Okay that was Flannery O’Connor not Peter Buck, but still.
It’s insane how good this book is, and the caricatured portrait of it that’s emerged thanks to the movies et al is such a total betrayal that I can’t think of a proper analog.
On a side note, upon looking at my quote from 2021 above it's also dawned on me that while I may have thought it depressing at the time to realize how much I identified with a "monster", as I'm reading it now I am PROUD to associate myself with him in this fashion, and I presume I'll be even more so by the end of the book.
It’s insane how good this book is, and the caricatured portrait of it that’s emerged thanks to the movies et al is such a total betrayal that I can’t think of a proper analog.
On a side note, upon looking at my quote from 2021 above it's also dawned on me that while I may have thought it depressing at the time to realize how much I identified with a "monster", as I'm reading it now I am PROUD to associate myself with him in this fashion, and I presume I'll be even more so by the end of the book.
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