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No Fear Translations of Shakespeare’s plays (along with audio!) and other classic works
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These are my enticements, and they are sufficient to conquer all fear of danger or death, and to induce me to commence this laborious voyage with the joy a child feels when he embarks in a little boat, with his holiday mates, on an expedition of discovery up his native river.
In Letter 1, Robert Walton writes to his sister Margaret Saville from the midst of a dangerous voyage to the North Pole. Here the text introduces concepts such as personal ambition and the quest for knowledge, foreshadowing the story Victor Frankenstein will come to tell about the dire consequences of each.
But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend.
In Letter 2, Walton writes again to his sister, this time touching upon one of the text’s major themes: isolation. Though he is excited about the trip and thrilled at the prospect of seeing a part of the world no one else has, he realizes the achievement will be a lonely one because he has no true friend to share it with.
Read more about The Harmful Effects of Isolation and Alienation as a theme.
A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship.
Walton continues to explain his feelings of loneliness in Letter 2. Though he is surrounded by men—courageous sailors who are no doubt up to the task of reaching the North Pole—he still feels lonely, and yearns for someone with a similar disposition to his own. He feels disconnected from the other men on the ship and attributes this to his youth, in which he was largely raised by his sister, affording him a more sophisticated character than that of his shipmates.
We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of giant stature, sat in he sledge and guided the dogs.
In Letter 4, while his ship is stuck, Walton describes to his sister the strange sight he and his men spied in the distance earlier: an enormous, human-shaped creature commanding a team of dogs attached to a sled. It’s with this description that we get our first look at Frankenstein’s monster.
I said in one of my letters, my dear Margaret, that I should find no friend on the wide ocean; yet I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart.
In Letter 4, Walton excitedly informs Margaret of a stranger he and his sailors rescued from the cold, a man on a sled who had been pursuing the enormous creature Walton glimpsed earlier. This man, we will later learn, is Victor Frankenstein. Walton feels an immediate kinship with him, illustrating the significance of true companionship, which Shelley will continue to explore throughout the text. This, at long last, is the friend Walton has been searching for. He is elated to find Victor both curious and knowledgeable, traits the two men share. However, Walton also notes that Victor is “broken by misery,” suggesting a link between his suffering and his quest for knowledge, and foreshadowing the idea that his tale will be a cautionary one. While Walton has only begun his story, Victor is in the middle or near the end of his.
