Frankenstein

• My rage was without bounds.
  • This is Victor’s line in the book. But in the 2025 movie, the creature says similar line: If you are not to award me love, then I will indulge in rage. Mine is infinite.

• I expected this reception. All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!

• Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
  • The hope. Hope that he can achieve happiness, fix his situation.

• Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shell judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defense before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me: listen to me, and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

• (Victor: Begone! relieve me from the sight of your detested form.) Thus I relieve thee, my creator, thus I take from thee a sight which you abhor. Still thou canst listen to me and grant me thy compassion. By the virtues that I once possessed, I demand this from you. Hear my tale (…)
  • The self-deprecation. Agreeing that his form is detestable, that Victor is right to be repulsed. He removes himself so that at least his voice can be heard.
  • The gesture makes Victor the Lady Justice (but he rejects the gesture).

• These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?

• Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst and heat! Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.

• (…) my protectors (for so I loved, in an innocent, half-painful self-deceit, to call them).
  • The creature knew he was deceiving himself by calling them ‘my protectors’. Especially he was doing the work for them. But his desire to be one of them was so great that he had to rely on imaginary relationship in which he was on the receiving end, unlike the reality where he was giving (and unrequited). Yet, the clarity stings.

• From you only could I hope for succour, although towards you I felt no sentiment but that of hatred. Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind. But on you only had I any claim for pity and redress, and from you I determined to seek that justice which I vainly attempted to gain from any other being that wore the human form.

• I am satisfied: miserable wretch! you have determined to live, and I am satisfied.
  • Not speaking just out of hatred of Victor. He might also have feared losing his only tie.
• (victor in pursuit) I was cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my eternal hell; yet still a spirit of good followed and directed my steps and, when I most murmured, sunk under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert, that restored and inspirited me. The fare was, indeed, coarse, such as the peasants of the country ate; but I will not doubt that it was set there by the spirits that I had invoked to aid me. Often, when all was dry, the heavens cloudless, and I was parched by thirst, a slight cloud would bedim the sky, shed a few drops that revived me, and vanish.
  • Reads like the creature helping Victor unnoticed. Again, out of that strange, mixed feeling. Victor, so blinded in his own emotions, couldn’t notice.

• (to Walton who call him hypocritical) Oh, it is not thus - not thus, yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow-feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. (…) I am content to suffer alone, while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory.

• When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man has friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

• But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing.

• I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the charming warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.

• Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.

• But soon, I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.
  • This is the only moment that readers hear him directly and clearly, and he’s saying goodbye.