LAUSR

“With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” So recalled Victor Frankenstein, reflecting on the creative act. By its end, however, Frankenstein has less to do with the scientist's creativity and more to do with his monster's. This is why Mary Shelley inverts this Promethean moment in the book's final scene, as the monster stands over the lifeless body of his creator. Frankenstein's last words mark the inversion: his “instruments of life,” he laments, had given rise to “an instrument of mischief,” a creature animated by a desire for human fulfillment. To live may mean behaving instrumentally, but some instruments get the better of you. Frankenstein learns this lesson the hard way; but does his monster? He echoes his creator's words—“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief”—and promises his own end, when he will “collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame.” One's frame is mere matter, but such an act is proof of the life that animates it. On the cusp of death, then, the monster lives. Frankenstein reminds us that the question “What is life?” can only be answered by experiment, from the medical horrors that gave the monster life to the fatal act with which he plans to abandon it. At life's end, as at its beginning, creator and creation combine; we become our instruments, or they surpass us.