The Narrative Frame

Frankenstein is in the form of a series of letters from St. Petersburgh, Archangel, and the Arctic Ocean, written by an arctic explorer called Robert Walton to his married sister Mrs Margaret Saville, in England. Mrs Saville only receives these letters — there is nothing from her in reply. So, the story of Frankenstein is told by Walton to his sister; he reports, apparently verbatim, the story Victor Frankenstein tells to him aboard his ship in the Arctic Ocean; and Victor Frankenstein purportedly reports verbatim the story the daemon tells to him when they meet on the ‘mer de glace’ in the Alps. In other words, Frankenstein is a story that comes to us via an elaborate series of frames. Such narrative framing devices are usually adopted to provide opportunities for the author to manipulate certain effects.