ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Frankenstein is a frame story written in epistolary form. It documents a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. The story takes place in the eighteenth century (the letters are dated as “17-").

Detailed explanation-2: -Frankenstein uses a frame narrative to provide context and details. Victor’s story is used as a cautionary tale, and the Creature’s story is used as a testament to what happens when one is constantly rejected by society.

Detailed explanation-3: -Robert Walton is a polar explorer who meets Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic. It is to Walton that Victor tells his story and he, in turn, writes the narrative down in a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Saville, back in England.

Detailed explanation-4: -FRAME NARRATIVE: A story within a story, within sometimes yet another story, as in, for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. As in Mary Shelley’s work, the form echoes in structure the thematic search in the story for something deep, dark, and secret at the heart of the narrative.

Detailed explanation-5: -Shelley uses the frame narrative to give alternative perspectives and to highlight the correlations between Victor and Walton with their passions for science and isolation. Captain Walton’s letters serve as a great asset to the ultimate frame narrative by being the first frame of the novel.