In Frankenstein: book two, City of Night, there seriously was not a theme. So, I thought that if I finished the third and final installment in the series I would find some sort of theme. How the storyline of the Frankenstein series is, is that the series is a compilation of related stories all told alternating in different chapters. The alternating stories all come together at the end of the series. The Frankenstein series, all three books are really just one story starting in the first book, continuing on through the second and then finishing in the third. Book two, the one I read, was really just a continuation of the first book leading to the second, without a real ending until the last book. The weirdest thing about the series was that since I thought that the end of the series would bring me a theme or lesson, it didn’t. The first and second books in the trilogy did not either. I’m not going to give away the ending of the series. Right when I was reading the ending climax of the book, I was sure there would be a theme or lesson. Now, after reading the climactic part of the end of the last book (where the theme should be, IF there is one at all), it finished without the real main character, Victor Frankenstein, learning anything at all.
Keep in mind that there wasn’t really a theme in my book-report book and that I’m getting my “theme” from the last book in the series. If the series had ended like I thought it was going to end, the theme would be this: if you create or do something really, really terrible, eventually people will try to stop you, and you will get what’s coming to you for doing what you did. Victor was creating a New Race. His New Race was malfunctioning and no longer being obedient to him, so Victor was going to do something about it. He went to where his cruel and twisted experiments on his New Race went when they went wrong. He went to the dump. The workers at the dump were all created by Victor and of the New Race, and since their program within them was malfunctioning, they began to hate Victor. When he went to the dump, he got what was coming to him. That happened, but that’s not quite how the series ended.
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Your main character maybe doesn't learn something- so you would consider that a static character. Now look at it this way (to get at a theme- and you kinda did) what did YOU learn? What did you discover about the desire to create something - like a new race, or even Frankenstein himself? What theme on cloning (or some other scientific thing) could you decifer from all this. It's kind of a "cop out" when teachers say that the theme is what the main character learns. We say this because if we asked students what they learned, inevitably, they'll say "nothing."
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ReplyDeleteIt must be hard to be a psychopath in the 21st century.
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