Unreliable Narration
At the conclusion of the novel I realized that Victor Frankenstien could very possibly be a closeted homosexual. His lackluster reaction to Elizabeth’s death was what really set me off on this sort of nutty idea, but its sort of present throughout the entirety of the novel.
Victor lacks romantic love for Elizabeth and instead, feels very possessively towards her. This is just sibling love to the extreme, and probably stemming from his parents’ involvement in their relationship from a young age; constantly pushing for them to be together.
Victor cares SIGNIFICANTLY more about Clerval’s death than Elizabeth’s, as is evident by the (almost) full chapter he writes about mourning for Clerval, and MAYBE a paragraph about Elizabeth. I know he follows up on that with being “emotionally exhausted” due to the recent bout of trama in his life or something, but Victor is such an unreliable narrator at this point I really don’t believe him.
I suppose for the time period, there was much less of a social stigma associated with being “gay” or “straight,” so classification isn’t the issue here, just some more instances about Victor being untruthful in his narration.
I guess the most difficult thing for me with this novel was discerning WHAT exactly makes a narrator unreliable when they’ve been created by the author to portray only specific facts? What do you guys think?
English 451 
I can see your reasoning with the idea that Victor Frankenstein is more attached to Henry than to Elizabeth. Part of the difficulty of knowing exactly what is going on is historical—homosocial relationships (platonic relationships between men) intersect with homoerotic relationships, but that intersection shifts over time.
Since we can’t properly answer that question, I’m much more interested in the larger issue, of whether Frankenstein is a reliable narrator. How can we ever know if a narrator is reliable, you ask. It’s a great question, and we’ll have to talk about it more in class.