Frankenstein begins when a young man named Captain Walton takes a ship into the Arctic Ocean. He's hoping to make important scientific discoveries. His ship gets stranded for a few days when a sheet of ice forms all around it. To his amazement, he and his crew see a gigantic man, about eight feet tall, driving a dog sled across the ice until it disappears in the distance. A little later, they see a normal-sized man on another dog sled, chasing the first one. This man is almost dead from exhaustion and exposure, so they take him aboard. The man is Victor Frankenstein. Walton becomes friends with him, and while Frankenstein is recovering, he tells Walton his story. Frankenstein grew up in Geneva. His father had been an important figure in the government, and they were well off. He grew up with his cousin, Elizabeth, whom his parents expected him to marry eventually. He had a little brother named William. He had a best friend named Henry Clerval. frankenstein goes to a famous university in ingolstadt where he becomes very good at science he figures out scientifically how to bring something to life though he doesn't tell us what the secret is he makes a creature using parts from a graveyard on a rainy night in november he brings it to life but he's so horrified by it that he runs away the next day his friend clerval arrives at the university to begin his studies but frankenstein becomes ill and clerval spends all winter nursing him just as he's getting better at the beginning of spring he gets a letter telling him that his little brother william has been murdered justine a servant in his house whom everyone always liked has been arrested because william had been carrying a locket that was found on her so frankenstein heads home just before he gets home he sees the monster from a distance and he knows that the monster killed his brother Frankenstein watches Justine's trial, and his cousin, Elizabeth, testifies that she's too nice to have done this, but she's convicted and sentenced to death. Frankenstein has to watch her die. Frankenstein goes with his family on a sightseeing trip, and one day, when he goes mountain climbing by himself, the monster appears to him and makes him sit down and listen to his story. Frankenstein would rather kill him, but he listens. The monster describes how he came to life completely disoriented. He didn't know how to speak or understand language, and he had to get used to the feel of his own body and to figure out basic concepts like light and dark, heat and cold, and hunger and thirst. He eventually wandered out into the forest, where he could hide and look for berries and nuts. The first human he sees is an old man in a hut, who runs away in terror because the monster is so hideous. He's fascinated by the first village he walks into, but the residents are terrified, and they drive him off by throwing things at him. He finally finds shelter in this little shed built up against the side of a cottage. He can look through a crack and observe the people who live there, but they don't know he's there. These people are called the DeLaces, a brother and sister named Felix and Agatha and their blind old father, who plays the guitar. The creature sees how much they love each other, and he wants to be like them. He starts learning language by listening to them speak French. One day, an Arabian woman named Safi arrives. Safie doesn't speak English or know much about European culture, so Felix teaches her everything from vocabulary and reading to history, and the monster learns along with her. He learns to read and write, and about good and evil, and about the history of human societies. In the woods, he finds three books, Paradise Lost, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Plutarch's Lives, and he reads the papers that were in Frankenstein's dressing gown, which reveal who Frankenstein is, where he lives, and how he came to make the monster. The monster starts to hate Frankenstein for giving him such an awful lonely existence and abandoning him, since he's too ugly to make friends with anyone. Eventually, the monster learns the story of these people. The DeLacys were a rich family in Paris, but Felix helped a wealthy Turk escape from prison because he felt sorry for him. So the government took the DeLacy family's money and banished them, and they went to live in the cottage. The Turk did escape from prison, but he abandoned Felix afterward. But the Turk's daughter, Safie, had fallen in love with Felix, so she escaped to come marry him. The monster wants to be friends with the DeLacies, and he decides that if he goes to talk to the old man first, the old man will listen, because he's blind. When the others leave, he pretends to be a traveler, and speaks to DeLacy, and it's going okay until Felix and Agatha and Safie come back. The women are horrified, and Felix drives the monster off with a stick. at first the monster goes out into the woods and decides that he's going to declare war on humans but in the morning he cools down and decides to go back and try again but he finds felix giving up the lease and he never sees the de lacy's again which makes him feel doubly rejected He comes back at night and destroys the cottage. Then he starts the long walk to Geneva to try to find his creator. He gets shot while he's on his way there, just because he stops to help a woman who's drowning. When he gets to Geneva, he grabs this little boy, thinking that he can use the boy to learn his way around. But when the boy mentions his father's name is Frankenstein, the monster kills him to get revenge on Frankenstein. You might notice that there's an inconsistency in the story here. because Victor made the creature in November, then got sick all winter. William got killed the following spring, maybe six months later. But the creature spends a whole year at the cottage, and he kills William more like 18 months after being created, so there's a difference of a year between the two stories. Just to be even more hateful, he puts the locket William was carrying in Justine's pocket, knowing she'll be condemned for murder. The monster insists that Frankenstein make a female as ugly as he is, so he'll have a companion. He promises to go away with her to South America, and threatens to kill lots of people if Frankenstein won't do it, so Frankenstein agrees. Frankenstein decides to go on a long trip and work on the new monster away from home, so he and Clairvall go on a long sightseeing trip through Germany, England, and Scotland. He eventually rents a little cottage on a remote island in Scotland to do the work. But he gets disgusted and destroys the new creature before it's finished. The monster comes in to find out what he's doing, and is furious that Frankenstein broke his promise. The monster swears he'll get revenge, and says, I'll be with you on your wedding night. Frankenstein takes all the parts and puts them in a basket, then sails out in a boat at night and dumps it all. Then he goes to sleep in the boat. When he comes ashore, he's in Ireland, and the people arrest him. It turns out someone strangled his friend, Clairvall, and they think Frankenstein did it. He gets sick again, because he's so upset that the monster killed another of his friends, and a magistrate has him nursed back to health. He's eventually released, since he didn't kill Clairvaux. He goes back home, and he marries Elizabeth, like they've been planning their whole lives. He thinks the monster is planning to kill him on his wedding night, so he sits up waiting with a gun, but the monster actually kills Elizabeth. His father dies of grief soon afterward, so Victor has lost everybody. He devotes his life to finding the monster and destroying it, but the monster keeps going farther and farther north, until they're chasing each other on dog sleds far out to sea. After he tells Walton the whole story, he dies. The monster comes on board the boat to pay a final farewell to Frankenstein. He tells Walton he's going to set himself on fire and destroy himself, because he didn't mean to be bad. Walton winds up taking the ship back home, partly because the crew makes him, and partly because Frankenstein's story shows that scientific discovery isn't worth sacrificing your life for. One of the major questions of the book is how much we should blame Frankenstein for what happens and how much the monster. Critics like to point out all the things that are wrong with Frankenstein, because he was irresponsible and created this monster for no good reason. Then he abandoned his creation instead of helping it, and he was very careless about protecting his friends. Readers tend to see the monster as more at fault, though, because even though he gets a lot of bad breaks, being frighteningly ugly and misunderstood, his decision to kill a child is just evil, and he keeps killing people out of spite, or for revenge. Another question is whether the creature is naturally good, like he claims to be, and what it is that makes him become evil, his own choices, or things that happen to him. For more information about Frankenstein, check out the Frankenstein Sparknote on sparknotes.com.