Storyline

Frankenstein is written in the form of a frame story that starts with Captain Robert Walton writing letters to his sister.

Captain Walton's introductory frame narrative

The novel Frankenstein is written in epistolary form, documenting a correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. Walton is a failed writer who sets out to explore the North Pole and expand his scientific knowledge in hopes of achieving fame. During the voyage the crew spots a dog sled mastered by a gigantic figure. A few hours later, the crew rescues a nearly frozen and emaciated man named Victor Frankenstein. Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion; he sees in Walton the same over-ambitiousness and recounts a story of his life's miseries to Walton as a warning.

Victor Frankenstein's narrative

Victor begins by telling of his childhood. Born into a wealthy family in Geneva, he is encouraged to seek a greater understanding of the world around him through science. He grows up in a safe environment, surrounded by loving family and friends. When he is four years old, his parents adopt Elizabeth Lavenza, an orphan whose mother has just died. Victor has a possessive infatuation with Elizabeth. Much of the story focuses on this infatuation and the rise and fall of their interactions. He has two younger brothers: Ernest and William.
As a young boy, Victor is obsessed with studying outdated theories of science that focus on achieving natural wonders. When he witnesses lightning strike an oak tree, splitting it in two, he is inspired to harness the power of lightning. His mother dies of scarlet fever weeks before he leaves for the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. At university, he excels at chemistry and other sciences, and develops a secret technique to imbue inanimate bodies with life. Victor constructs a reanimated creature.

The details of the monster's construction are left ambiguous, but Frankenstein is forced to make the creature roughly eight feet tall because of the difficulty in replicating the minute parts of the human body. His creation, which he has hoped would be beautiful, is instead hideous, with watery yellow eyes, and a withered, translucent, yellowish skin that barely conceals the muscular system and blood vessels. The creature has perfect, white teeth, black lips and long black hair. After bringing his creation to life, Victor is repulsed by his work: he flees the room, leaving the monster. Hopeless and saddened from rejection, the monster disappears.

Victor becomes ill from the experience. He is nursed back to health by his childhood friend, Henry Clerval. After a four-month recovery, he decides to return home when his brother William is found murdered. Upon arriving in Geneva, he sees the monster near the site of the murder, and becomes certain the creature is the killer. William's nanny, Justine, is hanged for the murder based on the discovery of William's locket in her pocket. Victor, though certain the monster is responsible, doubts anyone would believe him and is unable to stop the hanging.

Ravaged by his grief and self-reproach, Victor retreats into the mountains to find peace. The monster approaches him, ignoring his threats and pleading with Victor to hear his own tale. Intelligent and articulate, The Creature tells Victor of his own encounters with people, and how he had become afraid of them and spent a year living near a cottage, observing the DeLacey family living there and growing fond of them. The monster learned to speak by listening to the DeLaceys. He also discovered a lost satchel of books and taught himself to read. When he saw his reflection in a pool, he realised that his physical appearance is hideous compared to the humans he observed. Though he eventually approached the family with hope of becoming their friend, they were frightened by his appearance and drove him away, and then left the residence permanently. The creature, in a fit of rage, burned the cottage and left.

The monster concludes his story with a demand that Frankenstein create for him a female companion like himself. He argues that as a living thing, he has a right to happiness. He promises that if Victor grants his request, he and his mate will vanish into the wilderness of South America uninhabited by man, never to reappear.

Fearing for his family, Victor reluctantly agrees and travels to England to do his work. He is accompanied by Clerval, but they separate in Scotland. Through their travels, Victor suspects that the monster is following him. Working on a second being on the Orkney Islands, he is plagued by premonitions of what his work might wreak, particularly the idea that creating a mate for the creature might lead to the breeding of an entire race of creatures that could plague mankind. He destroys the unfinished female creature after he sees his first creation looking through the window. The monster witnesses this and, confronting Victor, vows to be with Victor on his upcoming wedding night. The monster murders Clerval and leaves the corpse on an Irish beach, where Victor lands upon leaving the island. Victor is imprisoned for the murder of Clerval, and becomes seriously ill, suffering another mental breakdown in prison. After being acquitted, and with his health renewed, he returns home with his father.

Once home Victor marries Elizabeth and prepares for a fight with the monster. Wrongly believing the monster's vowed revenge was for his own life, Victor asks Elizabeth to retire to her room for the night while he goes looking for "the fiend". While Victor searches the house and grounds, the creature murders Elizabeth. Victor sees the monster at the window, and the monster taunts Victor by pointing at Elizabeth's corpse. Grief-stricken by the deaths of William, Justine, Clerval, and now Elizabeth, Victor's father dies. Victor pursues the monster to the North Pole, but he does not kill his creation.

Captain Walton's concluding frame narrative

At the end of Victor's narrative, Captain Walton resumes the telling of the story. A few days after the creature vanishes, the ship becomes entombed in ice and Walton's crew insists on returning south once they are freed. In spite of a passionate speech from Frankenstein, encouraging the crew to push further north, Walton realises that he must relent to his men's demands and agrees to head for home. Frankenstein dies shortly thereafter.
Walton discovers the creature on his ship, mourning over Frankenstein's body. Walton hears the creature's misguided reasons for his vengeance and expressions of remorse. Frankenstein's death has not brought him peace. Rather, his crimes have increased his misery and alienation, and his words are almost exactly identical to Victor's own in describing himself. He vows to kill himself on his own funeral pyre so that no others will ever know of his existence. Walton watches as he drifts away on an ice raft that is soon lost in darkness.

Source. : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
Author : Mary Shelley
Posted by : admin -ST-Rex

In London, Gabriel John Utterson, a prosecutor, is on his weekly walk with his relative Richard Enfield, who proceeds to tell him of an encounter he had seen some months ago while coming home late at night from Cavendish Place. The tale describes a sinister figure named Edward Hyde who tramples a young girl, disappears into a door on the street, and re-emerges to pay off her relatives with 10 pounds in gold and a cheque signed by respectable gentleman Dr. Henry Jekyll (a client and friend of Utterson's) for 90 pounds. Jekyll had recently and suddenly changed his will to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. This development concerns and disturbs Utterson, who makes an effort to seek out Hyde. Utterson fears that Hyde is blackmailing Jekyll for his money. Upon finally managing to encounter Hyde, Hyde's ugliness, as if deformed, amazes Utterson. Although Utterson cannot say exactly how or why, Hyde provokes an instinctive feeling of revulsion in him. Much to Utterson's surprise, Hyde willingly offers Utterson his address. After one of Jekyll's dinner parties, Utterson stays behind to discuss the matter of Hyde with Jekyll. Utterson notices Jekyll turning pale, yet he assures Utterson that everything involving Hyde is in order and that he is to be left alone.

A year passes uneventfully. One night, a servant girl witnesses Hyde beat a man to death with a heavy cane. The victim was MP Sir Danvers Carew, who was also Utterson's client. The police, who suspect Hyde, contact Utterson. He leads the officers to Hyde's apartment, feeling a sense of foreboding amid the eerie weather (the morning is dark and wreathed in fog). When they arrive at the apartment, the murderer has vanished, but they find half of the cane (described as being made of a strong wood but broken due to the beating) left behind a door. It is revealed to have been given to Jekyll by Utterson. Shortly thereafter, Utterson again visits Jekyll, who now claims to have ended all relations with Hyde. Jekyll shows Utterson a note, allegedly written to Jekyll by Hyde, apologizing for the trouble that he has caused him and saying goodbye. That night, however, Utterson's clerk points out that Hyde’s handwriting bears a remarkable similarity to Jekyll's own.

For a few months, Jekyll reverts to his former friendly and sociable manner, as if a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Later, Jekyll suddenly starts refusing visitors, and Dr. Hastie Lanyon, a mutual acquaintance of Jekyll and Utterson, dies suddenly of shock after receiving information relating to Jekyll. Before his death, Lanyon gives Utterson a letter, with instructions that he not open it until after Jekyll's death or disappearance. Utterson goes out walking with Enfield, and they see Jekyll at a window of his laboratory. The three men start conversing, but a look of horror suddenly comes over Jekyll's face, and he slams the window and disappears. Soon afterward, Jekyll's butler, Mr. Poole, visits Utterson in a state of desperation and explains that Jekyll has secluded himself in his laboratory for several weeks. Utterson and Poole travel to Jekyll's house through empty, windswept, sinister streets. Once there, they find the servants huddled together in fear. They go to see the laboratory where they hear that the voice coming from inside is not the voice of Jekyll and the footsteps are light and not the heavy footsteps of the doctor. After arguing for a time, the two of them resolve to break into Jekyll's laboratory.

Inside, they find the body of Hyde wearing Jekyll's clothes and apparently dead from suicide. They find also a letter from Jekyll to Utterson promising to explain the entire mystery. Utterson takes the document home, where he first reads Lanyon’s letter and then Jekyll's. The first reveals that Lanyon’s deterioration and eventual death resulted from the shock of seeing Hyde drink a serum, or potion, and as a result of doing so, turn into Dr. Jekyll. The second letter explains that Jekyll, seeking to separate his good side from his darker impulses, discovered a way to transform himself periodically into a creature free of conscience, this being Hyde. The transformation was incomplete, however, in that it created a second, evil identity, but did not make the first identity purely good. At first, Jekyll reports that he delighted in becoming Hyde and rejoiced in the moral freedom that the creature possessed. Eventually, however, he found that he was turning into Hyde involuntarily in his sleep, even without taking the potion.
At this point, Jekyll resolved to cease becoming Hyde. One night, however, the urge gripped him too strongly, and after the transformation he immediately rushed out and violently killed Sir Danvers Carew. Horrified, Jekyll tried more adamantly to stop the transformations, and for a time he proved successful by engaging in philanthropic work. One day, at a park, he considered how good a person that he had become as a result of his deeds (in comparison to others), believing himself redeemed. However, before he completed his line of thought, he looked down at his hands and realized that he had suddenly transformed once again into Hyde. This was the first time that an involuntary metamorphosis had happened in waking hours. Far from his laboratory and hunted by the police as a murderer, Hyde needed Lanyon's help to get his potions and become Jekyll again, undertaking the transformation in Lanyon's presence, the shock of the sight instigated Lanyon's deterioration and death. Meanwhile, Jekyll returned to his home, only to find himself ever more helpless and trapped as the transformations increased in frequency and necessitated even larger doses of potion in order to reverse them. It was the onset of one of these spontaneous metamorphoses that caused Jekyll to slam his laboratory window shut in the middle of his conversation with Enfield and Utterson.
Eventually, the stock of ingredients from which Jekyll had been preparing the potion ran low, and subsequent batches prepared by Jekyll from renewed stocks of the ingredients failed to produce the transformation effected by the original potion. Jekyll speculated that the one essential ingredient that made the original potion work must have been a trace contaminant that was absent from the ingredients he had subsequently purchased. After sending his butler Poole to one chemist after another, to purchase the salt that was running low, only to find it wouldn't work, he assumed that subsequent supplies all lacked the essential ingredient that made the potion successful for his experiments. His ability to change back from Hyde into Jekyll had slowly vanished in consequence. Jekyll wrote that even as he composed his letter, he knew that he would soon become Hyde permanently, having used the last of this salt and he wondered if Hyde would face execution for his crimes or choose to kill himself. Jekyll noted that, in either case, the end of his letter marked the end of the life of Dr. Jekyll. He ended the letter saying "I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end". With these words, both the document and the novella come to a close.
Source : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde
Author : Robert Louis Stevenson
Posted by : admin -ST-Rex

Ketika perjalanan menuju Bandung dengan menggunakan kereta api. Secara tidak sengaja, seorang pemuda mempersilahkan tempat duduknya kepada Ratna karena tempat duduk yang lain telah penuh. Pemuda itu bernama Suparta, seorang pelajar dari STOVIA Jakarta. Ratna sendiri kini bersekolah di Frobelkweeschool. Mereka pun berkenalan satu sama lain. Ternyata, perkenalan itu membuat mereka saling menanam benih- benih cinta diantara masing- masing.

Liburan tiba, Suparta mengajak Ratna untuk pergi mengunjungi rumahnya di Sumedang. Ternyata, Suparta ingin memperkenalkan Ratna pada kedua orang tuanya. Akan tetapi, Nyai Raden Tedja Ningrum tidak begitu bersahabat terhadap Ratna setelah tahu bahwa Ratna berasal dari keturunan orang biasa dan bukan seorang bangsawan. Selama disana, Ratna selalu disinggung oleh Ibu Suparta tentang calon istri Suparta yaitu Nyai Raden Siti Halimah yang tidak lain ialah teman sekelasnya di Frobelkweeschool. Mendengar hal itu, Ratna merasa sakit hati.

Sejak saat itu, Ratna tersinggung dan kecewa terhadap Suparta. ia pun mencoba untuk melupakannya. Sayang, kesedihannya tidak berhenti disitu, ia pun harus putus sekolah karena usaha pembakaran kapal milik ayahnya , Tuan Atmaja bangkrut. Ia pun berusaha untuk mencari pekerjaan. Akhirnya, ia diterima menjadi pramusaji di sebuah toko. Disamping gajinya untuk memenuhi kebutuhan sehari- hari, juga ia pergunakan untuk membiayai sekolah adiknya. Malang bagi Ratna, belum lama bekerja di toko tersebut. Ia pun harus di PHK, begitupun dengan para pekerja yang lain. Toko itu harus ditutup atas perintah pengadilan sebab ada suatu hal yang belum terpenuhi.

Namun, Ratna tidak putus asa. Ia mencoba untuk tetap tabah dan mencari pekerjaan yang lain. Pernah, ia melamar pekerjaan ke kantor advokat, namun tidak berhasil dikarenakan pimpinan advokatnya itu selalu menggodanya. Tanpa disengaja, Ratna lewat di depan rumah mewah milik Nyonya dan Tuan Kornel. Ia pun mencoba melamar pekerjaan dan akhirnya ia diterima sebagai pembantu rumah tangga.

Nasib malang harus diterima Ratna lagi, salah seorang pembantu lain, Jene memfitnah bahwa Ratna telah mencuri perhiasan milik Nyonya Kornel. Ratna pun dilaporkan ke Polisi oleh Nyonya Kornel, sehingga ia ditangkap. Ratna yang merasa tidak melakukannya, bergegas melarikan diri ketika polisi yang menjaganya tertidur lelap. Ia melarikan diri dengan cara terjun ke Sungai Kwitang. Untung saja, nyawanya berhasil diselamatkan dan langsung dilarikan ke rumah sakit.

Beruntung bagi Ratna, sebab tepat waktu itu ia dirawat oleh kekasihnya sendiri, Suparta. Kini, Suparta telah berprofesi menjadi dokter tetap di rumah sakit itu. Betapa gembiranya Suparta bertemu dengan Ratna di rumah sakit. Sebab sampai saat ini, dia sudah mencari Ratna kemana- mana namun tidak berhasil. Kini, Ibu Suparta sudah menerima keadaan Ratna apa adanya. Sayang, Ratna sendiri hilang bagai ditelan bumi. Beberapa tempat telah dicari oleh Suparta. Bahkan dia pergi ke Togoapu, rumah orang tua Ratna tapi Ratna tidak ada di sana. Kemudian, Suparta pergi ke Kebon Sirih atas saran orang tua Ratna yang memberitakan kalau Ratna tinggal disana. Ternyata, kedatangan Suparta telah terlambat sebab saat itu Ratna dan adiknya sudah berangkat ke Jakarta. Suparta pun sampai putus asa mencari kesana- sini. Beruntung baginya, tiba- tiba saja ia bertemu Ratna yang sedang terluka di rumah sakit.

Ratna menceritakan semua kejadian yang terjadi, sehingga ia bisa sampai di rumah sakit. Dokter Suparta pun berusaha keras menolong kekasihnya itu. Dia mencari seorang pengacara guna menemani Ratna di pengadilan atas tuduhan pencurian perhiasaan milik Nyonya Kornel. Setelah diadili, ternyata Ratna tidak bersalah melainkan Amat yang mencuri perhiasan itu. Amat adalah kekasih Jene. Jene tidak dihukum melainkan Amat yang dihukum. Pengadilan itu juga telah mempertemukan Ratna dengan adiknya, Sudarma. Kini Sudarma menjadi schatter pegadaian di Purwakarta yang saat itu bertindak sebagai saksi mata atas kejadian itu. Oleh Suparta dan adiknya, Ratna disuruh beristirahat di paviliun yang bernama Bidara Cina. Hanya Suparta dan Sudarma yang diperkenankan memeriksa kesehatan Ratna.

Setelah Ratna sehat, Dokter Suparta melamar Ratna. Akhirnya, mereka pun menikah namun pestanya dilaksanakan di rumah Sudarma. Setelah menikah, mereka berdua kembali ke Togoapu untuk tinggal di rumah tuan atmaja. Rumah itu dibangun atas bantuan Suparta sebagai hadiah perkawinan mereka.

Sumber : http://kedairomanindonesia.blogspot.com/2010/12/pertemuan-jodoh.html
Karya   : Abdul Muis

By : admin-Trainer-K