Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Sykalo Eugen 2024

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

It’s funny, isn’t it? How some books just… stick. Not like glue, more like a burr in your sock after a long walk through overgrown fields. Frankenstein. The name itself is less a title and more a kind of cultural shorthand, a meme before memes were even a glint in anyone’s digital eye. You say “Frankenstein” and everyone’s already conjured up some hulking green guy with bolts in his neck, lumbering through a black-and-white movie. And maybe that’s the real tragedy of it all, the ultimate, ironic twist: the monster became the legend, not the man who made him. The creature, the nameless, agonizingly articulate creature, got folded into the commercialized, Halloween-aisle version of himself. And Victor? He’s just… Frankenstein. The name. The creator subsumed by his own creation’s monstrous renown.

But let’s get real. If you’ve actually read Shelley’s novel, the whole bolt-necked, grunting caricature just… dissolves. What you’re left with is this raw, thrumming nerve of a story that feels, in its own way, shockingly contemporary. Not in some “oh, it’s still relevant today!” platitude kind of way. More like, it vibrates at a frequency that Twitter discourse is still trying, clumsily, to achieve. It’s about obsession, certainly. And ego, definitely. But underneath all that, it’s about a profound, almost excruciating loneliness. A loneliness so deep it curdles into resentment, then blossoms into full-blown, apocalyptic rage.

I mean, Victor Frankenstein. What a guy. He’s not some mad scientist cackling in a gothic lab, not really. He’s more like that ridiculously brilliant, utterly self-absorbed grad student you knew, the one who lived on caffeine and ambition, who had a faint aroma of unwashed laundry and a faraway look in his eyes that suggested he was always, always thinking of something far more important than mere human interaction. He gets this wild hair up his… well, wherever ideas get started, and decides he’s going to unlock the secrets of life itself. Not just understand them, mind you. Create them. Like, I don’t know, if you were a baker and instead of just making bread, you decided you were going to invent the wheat. From scratch.

And that’s where it all goes sideways, as it always does when ambition outstrips empathy. He slaves away, surrounded by dead bodies and the stench of his own singular purpose. He builds this… being. And then, the moment it opens its eyes, the horror hits him. It’s not beautiful. It’s not perfect. It’s a grotesque patchwork, a jumble of reanimated parts that, together, create something utterly terrifying in its raw, unformed power. And what does our brilliant, visionary Victor do? He flees. He literally bolts. Runs away from his own creation like a teenager who just accidentally set fire to the kitchen while trying to make toast.

It’s just… astounding, the sheer, unadulterated cowardice of it. And this is where my brain just starts screaming. Because this isn’t just some old story about a monster. This is about responsibility. Or, more accurately, the stunning lack of it. Victor creates this life, this sentient being with feelings and desires, and then he just… abandons it. Leaves it to fend for itself in a world that, quite understandably, reacts to its appearance with abject terror and disgust. It’s like birthing a child and then dropping it off in the middle of a shopping mall, expecting it to just… figure things out. And then getting mad when it starts screaming because it’s hungry and alone and everyone’s pointing and whispering.

And the creature! Oh, the creature. This is where Shelley’s genius really shines, because she doesn’t make him a mindless brute. Not at all. He’s articulate, he’s intelligent, he’s sensitive. He learns language by eavesdropping on a family, he reads Milton and Plutarch and Goethe. He grapples with complex philosophical questions, with the very nature of good and evil. He wants love, he wants companionship, he wants understanding. He’s not born evil; he’s made evil by the crushing weight of human rejection. He’s a pariah, a living, breathing testament to the idea that sometimes, the real monsters aren’t the ones who look different, but the ones who refuse to see past the surface. He’s the ultimate outsider, begging for a single hand to hold, and instead receiving only stones and curses. It’s heartbreaking, honestly. Truly, genuinely heartbreaking.

You read his pleas, his desperate arguments for a companion, for a second chance at connection, and you almost forget he’s stitched together from cadavers. You just see the pain, the profound, aching loneliness that mirrors, in a twisted way, Victor’s own isolation. Because Victor, too, is ultimately alone, consumed by his secret, haunted by his creation. They’re two sides of the same coin, really, two poles of a terrible magnetic field, repelling and attracting each other in a dance of mutual destruction.

And it just gets worse. Victor’s refusal to create a companion for the creature, that final, brutal rejection, is the tipping point. It’s the moment the creature—who, up until then, despite all his suffering, still harbored a flicker of hope—snaps. He pledges revenge, a relentless, all-consuming vengeance against the man who gave him life only to damn him to perpetual solitude. And honestly? Who can blame him? It’s a dark, terrible logic, born from the crucible of abandonment. If you can’t have love, what’s left but to make the architect of your misery suffer just as profoundly?

The ensuing chase, this relentless pursuit across continents, is less a thrilling adventure and more a grim, soul-crushing descent into madness for both of them. Victor, wracked with guilt and fear, dedicating his life to destroying what he made. The creature, a dark phantom, always a step ahead, always orchestrating new torments. It’s a tragic opera, really, played out on an icy, unforgiving stage. And the ending… well, the ending is bleak, as it should be. No easy answers, no tidy resolutions. Just the bitter, frozen landscape of their intertwined fates.

What gets me, though, is how it still resonates. Not just with the superficial "be careful what you wish for" moral, but with something deeper. It’s about the hubris of invention without foresight. It’s about the responsibility of creators, whether they’re making a life or an algorithm. It’s about the terrifying power of othering, of declaring someone or something inherently monstrous simply because they don’t fit neatly into our preconceived notions of what’s acceptable or beautiful. It’s a warning, sure, but it’s also a mirror, reflecting our own tendencies to discard what we don’t understand, to demonize what we fear, to abandon what we deem imperfect. And that, more than any stitched-together body, is the true horror of it all. It’s us. It’s always been us.