Critics

• Frankenstein shows the limits of individuality by replacing the individual voice with a network of voices. “In spite of its title, Frankenstein refuses to be solely Victor Frankenstein’s story”.

• It also provides “questions of narrative authority”.

• Mary Favret

Critics

• “The complex structure of the novel, the multiple voices-within-voices that filter the action, although an integral part of the ‘story’ function at times almost as an estrangement or distancing device”

• Karen Ann Hohne

Critics

• “Shelley creates a situation in which it becomes impossible to know the reliability of a given narrator”.

• Michael Garner

Critics

• Shelley adds realism through the use of epistolary style

• “Mary Shelley’s device of the frame-story of the explorer… adds credibility to [the] internal voices”

• Jason Marc Harris• The framing device buffers “Frankenstein’s

horror story with Walton’s relative normalcy”.• Susan Sniader Lanser

Critics

• In Gothic literature, Shelley is “the first to invite sympathy for the monster, to allow him to speak and explain the origins of his monstrous behaviour”

• David Punter