Chapters 11 to 16: the creature's story — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Chapters 11 to 16: the creature's story
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
The creature's own narrative: his first sensations, the villagers' attack, the De Laceys and Safie, how he learns to speak and read,
his rejection by the cottagers, and William's murder.
Key quotations: 'I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch', 'some fled, some attacked me', 'This was indeed a godlike science', 'how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!', 'Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?', 'Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?', 'Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence', 'struck me violently with a stick', 'I, like the arch-fiend, bore a hell within me', 'This was then the reward of my benevolence!', 'Frankenstein! you belong then to my enemy', 'not I, but she shall suffer'.
Form: the creature's first-person narrative inside Victor's, and the eloquence that wins the reader's sympathy.
Context: the books the creature reads, Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and The Sorrows of Werter, and Milton's Adam and Satan.
Edexcel's novel question has two parts, and neither marks context: part (a) on the printed extract marks language, form and structure (AO2); part (b) on the novel elsewhere, from memory, marks the argument and its references (AO1), not language analysis. Use context only where it explains a reading, and say which part each worked paragraph and exam tip is for.
