Note: the following article on reality in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 150-152) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.
Reality in Frankenstein is a matter of temporal perception. On more than one occasion Victor Frankenstein alludes to a distorted sense of time, which effectively precludes the possibility of defining reality. As the grieving scientist admits, “[s]ix years had elapsed, passed as a dream” (F 61).
However, the most powerful sense of loss of reality for Frankenstein comes after his friend, Henry Clerval, is found dead. The hapless man mentions how everything “passed like a dream from [his] memory” (F 135), and a little later, while in prison, he insists saying “if it all be true, if indeed I did not dream” (F 136).
Furthermore, he confesses that his entire life passed before his eyes like a dream, causing him to doubt whether any of it was real, “for it never presented itself to [his] mind with the force of reality” (F 136).
