Frankenstein – A Lesson for Artificial Intelligence Part 2

If you made this far, I truly appreciate your time and interest in this subject matter. In case you landed on this post for the first time, please read the part 1 of this article because it won’t make sense without the previous one. Now, let’s continue the story:

Story of Frankenstein’s Creature

When the creature is awaken, it doesn’t understand anything as a newly born child does. So, not finding anyone to comfort or take care of it, it starts wandering around. Soon it finds itself inside the woods surrounded by dark and wildness. Then, it keeps on wandering for numerous days through the dense forests, avoiding other living beings as far as possible. During this period, it endures extreme cold and painful sensations in its body. But even more painful than physical pain, it realizes that it isn’t liked or welcomed by anyone.

Once it hears a crying of a child who was going to fall into the river and rushes forward to save her. Just after he had saved the child, a man attacks him thinking it as a monster, who is trying to kill the child. During that encounter, it even gets shot by a bullet, which does hurt it exceedingly. After that event and various other acts of hatred shown towards it, it completely avoids humans and continues its aimless journey in solitude.

Frankenstein's Creature
Frankenstein’s Creature

Then, it comes near to a poor French family living near the woods. The family consists of an old blind man, his son and his daughter.  Feeling compassion towards their hardihood and hoping for their friendship, it starts to live around them without letting them know. With the objective to help them, it does their works and chores, but never appears before them. And with its help, the living of the family truly gets easier as well. It listens to their conversations, and learns their language too. It also realizes their whole background and feels deeply attached to the family.

So one fine day, he finally decides to present itself to the family, his only loved ones. Since it had already realized that people had problem with its looks, it goes to their house when only the blind old father was in home. After introducing itself and its purpose for visitation, the blind man welcomes him in a very friendly and caring manner. The blind man even begins to show compassion and gratitude towards it, but suddenly the young children enter the house. And upon finding a hideous looking creature near their father, the son attacks and chases him. The creature, although being strong enough to tear the young man’s body into pieces with its bare hands, leaves them harmless because it truly and sincerely loved them.

This event triggers the utmost feeling of hatred and revenge inside that creature towards its creator. It believes that its creator is the real cause of all its misery and sorrow. If its creator hadn’t awaken it or hadn’t abandoned it or had given good appearance to it, it wouldn’t have gone through so many troubles and loneliness. Therefore, it makes the destruction of Frankenstein its only goal in life.

After listening to the creature’s story, Frankenstein gets deeply moved and re-considers his role towards his creation. But one look that he throws towards the creature sitting in front of him, extinguishes all his sympathy for that creature. The whole story of the creature and all its evidences to confirm it, become useless in the eyes of Frankenstein as soon as they fall upon its ugly features. (Maybe that’s how blind we human are because we generally give preference to outer appearance than inner virtue.)

Anyhow, they make a deal, in which Frankenstein would create a friend for the creature and in return, the creature along with its new friend would leave the human surroundings forever. And with an objective to complete this deal, Frankenstein leaves his family and heads abroad along with his best friend. After reaching abroad, he leaves his friend back and goes further to a distant place, where he could work undisturbed. Meanwhile, the creature had been following him throughout the journey without being perceived.

Once again, he gets into the same monotonous work, but this time without the inspiration and energy that he had earlier. This goes on for several weeks and when the work is almost complete, he realizes the presence of the creature around him. During all this time, he had been thinking and re-thinking about what he was doing. Since that one creature was capable of doing so much harm to people, he feared what the two of them might do in future. In other hand, he also believed that it might all be over if he’ll stick to the deal and the creature will fulfill its.

But when he sees the creature grinning at his work, which was about to be completed, his hatred towards its hideous figure overpowers his judgement and he destroys all his work. Upon seeing its creator break their deal, the creature leaves being furious and hurt. The next day, Frankenstein’s best friend’s dead body is discovered and he himself gets framed for the crime. After the imprisonment of few months, his father finally succeeds in releasing him and takes him back home.

By this time, he has already lost his loved ones one after another. The only two people left in his life are his father and the adopted girl, with whom he’s in love. And not to mention, he has got one arch enemy, who’s fully determined in making him as lonely and miserable as itself. But even then, he couldn’t tell his family about this creature, though he wants to protect them at any cost. In the midst of all this, his father requests him to marry the girl and let go of all his troubles to begin a new life. So, he marries her.

Frankenstein's CreatureFrankenstein

However, he immediately receives his punishment for underestimating his arch-enemy through the murder of his newly-wed wife at the night of their wedding. Then, being devastated by the loss of all his loved ones, he also decides to take revenge with his creature and keeps on chasing it to the end of the story. During this chase, he never catches the creature, but never loses it either. In reality, the creature also doesn’t let him lose it because Frankenstein is its only purpose of living. So, it keeps on leaving hints throughout its journey so that Frankenstein would learn its whereabouts and follow it.

And at the end, Frankenstein’s health keeps on degrading and he is living his last days when he meets the ship that has been mentioned earlier. After narrating his story and requesting the ship caption to learn from his life, he dies. Note, he never reveals his secrets for creating a living being. And immediately afterwards, the creature also appears in the ship. Upon finding its dead master, it also loses its purpose in life and sense of belonging to the world. So, it leaves the ship, never to be seen again.

Phew! This is the summarized version of the story. It nearly gave me goosebumps when I read the book. To be honest, it really moved me and made me think about its events time and again. After reading it, I’ve always been wondering about what would’ve happened if Frankenstein had acted certain ways towards his creation. I mean if you think about it, he had made probably the biggest discovery in human history and could’ve completely changed the world. But he ended up destroying himself with his own invention.

I thought I’d complete this article here. However, now I think it’d be better if I just end this part here and continue the rest in another part. Up to now, I’ve concisely narrated the whole story. In next post, I would be talking about Artificial Intelligence and would try to relate it with Frankenstein’s story.

At last, I’d like you to think about an answer for a question: Is Frankenstein’s creature a monster? I’d truly appreciate it if you could share your answer in the Comments section so that other readers can also see it. And as always, thanks for reading! See you in the next part! 🙂


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *