In chapter 5, the morning after Frankenstein brings his creature to life, he wanders the streets to try and "ease the load that weighed upon [his] mind." At this moment, Shelley cites a few lines from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Like one who, on a lonely road,Doth walk in fear and dread,And, having once turned round, walks on,And turns no more his head;Because he knows a frightful fiendDoth close behind him tread.
In Coleridge's poem, the eponymous mariner is cursed with a life of loneliness for killing an innocent albatross. This very much foreshadows Frankenstein's life. After creating and then abandoning the creature, he will spend much of the rest of the novel in a state of lonely solitude. Indeed, it becomes the creature's mission to kill those whom Frankenstein loves, in order to make Frankenstein feel something like the loneliness to which Frankenstein has condemned the creature.
In chapter 17, the creature confesses his loneliness to Frankenstein when he asks for "a creature of another sex" to keep him company. He says that his "vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal." In other words, the creature says that the evil he commits is the product of the loneliness that has been forced upon him, and only companionship will, therefore, quell his evil.
In chapter 9, following the deaths of William and Justine, Frankenstein becomes utterly depressed and takes solace in solitude. He says that "solitude was [his] only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude." Later in the novel, in chapter 18, after Frankenstein has agreed to make a companion for his creature, Frankenstein again finds solace in his loneliness. In Geneva, alone in a boat on the lake, Frankenstein takes "refuge in the most perfect solitude." He spends day after day "alone in a little boat, watching the clouds and listening to the rippling of the waves, silent and listless."
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