The Frame Narrative in Frankenstein

What is a Frame Narrative ?

Frame story, also called frame tale, overall unifying story within which one or more tales are related.

In the single story, the opening and closing constitutes a frame. In the cyclical frame story—that is, a story in which several tales are related—some frames are externally imposed and only loosely bind the diversified stories. 

Famous Examples of Frame Narratives 

The Thousand and One Nights, the frame consists of the story of Scheherazade, who avoids death by telling her king-husband a story every night and leaving it incomplete. 

Jātakaṭṭhavaṇṇanā, a collection of some 550 widely popular and often illustrated stories of former lives of the Buddha (known as Jatakas). It is cast within a framework of Buddhist ethical teaching.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, for example, presents a frame story centred on 10 people fleeing the Black Death who gather in the countryside and as an amusement relate 10 stories each; the stories are woven together by a common theme, the way of life of the refined bourgeoisie, who combined respect for conventions with an open-minded attitude toward personal behaviour. 

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) too, the pilgrimage frame brings together varied tellers of tales, who emerge as vivid personalities and develop dramatic relationships among themselves and with their tales.

The Frame Narrative in Frankenstein

In the outer frame, explorer Robert Walton writes to his sister Mrs Saville, and tells of meeting Frankenstein in the Arctic; in the next frame, Frankenstein recounts his life story to Walton; in the innermost tale, the monster at a crucial moment tells his tale to Frankenstein. When the monster has finished, Frankenstein resumes speaking in his own right; when he has done, Walton resumes

What the Frame Narrative achieves in Frankenstein

>>The nested narrative structure calls attention to the presence of a listener for each speaker -- of a narratee for each narrator -- and to the interlocutionary relations thus established. Each act of narration in the novel implies a certain bond or contract: listen to me because . . . The structure calls attention to the motives of telling; it makes each listener -- and the reader -- ask: Why are you telling me this? What am I supposed to do with it? As in the psychoanalytical context of storytelling the listener is placed in a transferential relation to the 

narrative. As a "subject supposed to know," the listener is called upon to "supplement" the story (to anticipate the phrase Freud will use in the case history of Dora), to articulate and even enact the meaning of the desire it expresses in ways that may be foreclosed to the speaker. Storytelling in Frankenstein is far from an innocent act: narratives have designs on their narratees that must he unravelled. The issues posed by such a narrative structure may most of all concern relation, or how narrative relation relates to intersubjective relation, and the relation of relation, in both these senses, to language as the medium of telling and listening, as the medium of transmission, transaction, and transference.

>>In the actual heart of the book is located the tale of the Creature itself in between the accounts of Victor. And even within this story lies the story about the DeLecays, a family of peasants the Creature observed for a long time. So each of the stories is framed by another one, thus the frame narrative structure in Frankenstein. From outward in, the stories become more significant, dangerous and powerful. The fact that Margaret, the addressee of Walton's letters, is cut off from the chain of narratives by the outermost frame and therefore not in any real danger of anything in the story also causes the reader to be more calm. This is not the most typical Gothic novel, since the person most scared is not the reader, but Victor.

The epistolary narration by Robert Walton somehow justifies why the story is being told at all, considering that his character is not vital for the plot. In addition, the “frame narrative appears to foreground the indeterminacy of the novel, rather than to provide us in Walton with a reader-substitute who can indirectly guide our own interpretation and response.”12 He does not offer any moral message after heaving heard Victor's story and the Creature's final confessions, as the reader might expect from a narrator concluding the book.

Walton's frame also foreshadows general key themes of the novel which will be developed further throughout the novel and so draws the reader's attention to the topics to come. In a way he sets the scene for the drama that is to come, e.g. by telling the reader that he “never saw a man in so wretched a condition”13 when he first meets Victor in the Arctic. In their conversation Victor foreshadows the miserable events that are about to happen by warning Walton that since he is about to pursue “the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral form my tale”14. During the first letter a lot of similarities between Victor Frankenstein and himself are established, which the reader will discover later on; for instance Walton's “ardent curiosity […] sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death”15 and the fact that he “preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in [his] path”16 match Victor's opinion that “Wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery”17.

>>The intention of each narrative is to create some effect on the narration. The narrative of monster attempts to convince his creator, Victor, to take his responsibility as parent and to make a mate for him. Victor’s narrative ventures to persuade Walton to end his journey and to destroy the monster.

Through the narratives, the parallels between the characters are sketched that linked the stories together. The ambition of Walton turns him a potential Victor Frankenstein and his isolation from the people brings him close like the monster. In this sense, Walton is parallel to Victor and Monster.