How Shelley presents The creature, and how the character develops across the text: from a benevolent, eager learner to a murderer made by rejection and loneliness, and his remorse at the end.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel', 'I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend', 'am I not alone, miserably alone?', 'I was in reality the monster that I am', 'Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?', 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?', 'Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?', 'from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species', 'If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion', 'My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor', 'I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse', 'Evil thenceforth became my good', 'I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on', 'Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?'.
Context: Paradise Lost, the creature as both Adam and Satan, and the question of whether he is born a monster or made one.
How he is named and seen: never given a name, called wretch, fiend, devil and monster, yet more eloquent than anyone who describes him.
