Response to Ashley

Getting Lost in Neuromancer

This was supposed to be posted in ashley’s comments, but that pesky spam filter outsmarted me.

Totally agree with you, Ashley.  I have a hard time completely immersing myself into the Neuromancer universe as well, mostly due to questions and conundrums regarding the technology in the novel.  For example, Molly’s glasses/goggles.  When/if ever Molly cries, do they fill up with her tears like goggles in a swimming pool, obscuring her vision and thus defeating their entire purpose?  I find myself continually going off on mental tangents, trying to resolve the thousands of questions that the book poses.  Not that the novel isn’t highly entertaining, I think it just takes a little longer to process the information, something that was sort of unexpected when I began reading it this past week.  I began this course with the presumption that science fictions novels were hardly academic, and have already realized that I was very, very, wrong.

More parallels

I was really fascinated by both these short stories, more specifically “Who Goes There?”  Both John Carpenter’s novella and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstien” are really ahead of their time.  I know that phrase is often tossed around, and I think we may have touched on this in the first or second class with “Frankenstien”, but I feel as if both of these stories shaped the modern monster/alien genre in both literature and cinema.  I assumed Carpenter’s story was predated by Stephen King and Don Siegel, but was sort of shocked at the date of publication: 1931.

Two groundbreaking stories for their time, with their own similarities.  The Antarctic setting, as I’m sure everyone noticed, as well as the descriptions of the respective “monsters.” On page four of “Who Goes There,” the thing is described as follows “the evil, unspeakable face of that monster leering up as he’d first seen it through clear, blue ice, with a bronze ice-ax buried in its skull.”  This brought up some striking imagery of the Frankenstien creature’s awakening, and I found some obvious parallels between the two monsters and the way they’re written. Both monsters are “awakened,” but in distinctly different ways.  These two stories, and how old they both are, sort of make me wonder if there is some sort of template for successful science fiction stories.

 

p.s. “The Thing from Another World” is totally worth a watch if you guys haven’t seen it before. If you aren’t too busy playing portal.

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?

More Parallels

Sort of inspired by Ashley’s post before reading the entirety of volume 1, I found a lot of parallels between Robert Walton and Victor Frankenstein.  Walton, an explorer and adventurer, is faced with the dilemma of continuing his travels and risking his own life, as well as his crew’s, or realizing his dream and continuing his journey to the North Pole.  I found this to be similar to Victor’s dilemma, one of satisfying his desire to dabble in the mysteries of the natural world, which he seems to know will cause trouble within his seemingly picturesque family, or avoid the subject completely and save himself and his loved ones from harm.

At this point in the novel, Walton isn’t as nearly dejected as the fatalistic Victor, who is retelling his tale to Walton.   This was further confirmed by Walton’s liking towards Margaret.  He even goes as far as to state “I have found a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to possess as a brother of the heart (pg 28)” I found the characters to be extremely similar, and assume that they will continue to be, despite the fact that they are at extremely different stages in their lives, with Walton at the peak and Victor at the very bottom.

i use preexisting themes because i’m unoriginal.