The End

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

In the end of Frankenstein, although Victor's mournful struggle for life ends and his entire family has been decimated, he is still able to die with some form of peace. In his dreams and as he comes closer to death, he relishes in the fact that he will soon be with his family, in which he even believed that their spirits had been watching over him the entire time. Oddly enough, Victor dies not discontent that the creature still lives and even feels no remorse for his decision to reject the monster's companion. He speaks of how he fulfilled a far more important that his duty to his creature, his duty towards mankind. By his actions he inhibited the creation of a new race that, with preconceived hatred of mankind, could rout destruction to his fellow man. Seeing Victor's sure resolve and peaceful passing at least give the reader some sense of contentment.

Walton is greatly disturbed by the lose of his friend. He describes Victor's passing as, "the untimely extinction of this glorious spirit?" (Shelley 162). He remorses the fact that he had meat such a fine gentleman only at the brink of his death. Such feelings truly display Victor's loneliness. Such an affliction may seem simply ascribed to his current position, stuck out at sea with a crew of strangers, however, his sadness seems to be deeply rooted in a much more internal loneliness. Almost as if even back home, Walton did not have many friends to rely on. The fact that he is sending his letters to his sister and not some close friend or significant other only stresses this even more. Another, point of Walton at the end of the book is the parallelism with his final choices and victors. There comes a point when Victor shamefully and disappointedly admits the end of the voyage, for he does not want to risk the lives around him by his own ambition. Such a statement only reminds one of Victor, and how his own ambitions affected the lives of those around him. He must relinquish his hopes and return to England as a sorrowful failure, but an alive failure.

Finally, the creature ends this book with a sudden show of sympathy. As Frankenstein's monster speaks to Walton, one receives a brief look back unto before the creature was a heinous demon. During times when his hopes of being received and loved were extinguished by mankind. He states, "Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from the door with contumely?...Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the savior of his child?" (Shelley 165). On seeing Victor's cold, dead form he finally relinquishes his hatred for his actions, admitting to being a slave to passion. However, it would only have taken till the total destruction of his enemy that he would come to regret them. In the end, the creature resolves to enter the deepest depths of the arctic where he ends his wretched life. Throughout this story, the lives of Victor and the creature were juxtaposed so similarly, that one could only get a Harry Potter v. Lord Voldemort vibe. In the end, it is only fitting that if one would die, so would the other, in turn, die.