Like Father Like Son: Imitation and Creation Alison Anne Kuhns

Genesis states, "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him". Humans, therefore, were created as a likeness to God. <I>Frankenstein</i> describes a similar act of creation in that in the novel, too, the creation is made in the creator's own image. Victor Frankenstein succeeds in discovering the secret of animation, and brings a monster made of parts of the dead to life. The monster, from the moment of his birth, can be seen to mirror and to parallel the life of his creator: their lives and their fates are horrifically intertwined.

Frankenstein desires to "give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man" (55). He gathers his materials from dead humans, amassing bones to imitate the human frame, although on a grander scale: "I resolved to make the being of a gigantic stature... proportionately large" (55). Frankenstein assembles the monster out of pieces of the dead and uses the human frame as his model; he thus makes him as close to his own image as possible.

Although it is obvious that the circumstances of Frankenstein's birth and the monster's construction are rather different events (although they are both indisputably "births"...