Writer's methods — Frankenstein — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Writer's methods
Writer's methods
What you need to know
How Shelley's form, structure and language create meaning: the frame narrative and its three narrators, Walton's letters, the Gothic and the sublime,
settings and weather, the language of monstrosity, allusions to Paradise Lost, Prometheus and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and doubling between Victor and the creature.
Narrative structure: Walton's letters enclose Victor's story, which encloses the creature's, and each narrator shapes what we believe.
The Gothic and the sublime: the creation on 'a dreary night of November', storms, graveyards, glaciers and the Arctic ice.
Allusion: Coleridge's Ancient Mariner ('the land of mist and snow'), Milton's Paradise Lost and the myth of Prometheus.
Doubling: creator and creature both 'bore a hell within' them, and Walton's ambition mirrors Victor's.
Foreshadowing and pathetic fallacy: Victor's hindsight ('Destiny was too potent') and weather that mirrors feeling.
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.
