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"Can anyone help me with an answer to this passage it is from the ATI TEAS English Section? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein begat another monster - the frequently cartooned, green-skinned Frankenstein of popular culture who roams the streets on Halloween in the company of mummies and skeletons. In the novel, the monster is nameless, and Victor Frankenstein is the creature's creator, an earnestly romantic, idealistic, and well-educated young gentlemen whose studies in ""natural philosophy""(p,40) and chemistry evolve from ""fervent longing to penetrate the secret of nature"" (p.41). However, it is a tribute to the power of Shelley's work-a masterpiece-that is has spawned a parody, no matter how skewed, much as Frankenstein's creation parodies the divine creation of Adam. There is some logic, too, in the popular tendency to conflate the monster and his creator under the name of ""Frankenstein."" As the novel progresses, Frankenstein and his monster vie for the role of the protagonist. We are predisposed to identify with Frankenstein, whose character is admired by his virtuous friends and family and even by the ship captain who rescues him, deranged by his ques for vengeance, from the ice floe. He is a human being, after all. However, despite his philanthropic ambition to ""banish disease from the human frame and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death"" (p.42), Frankenstein becomes enmeshed in a loathsome pursuit that causes him to destroy his health and shun his ""fellow-creatures as if... guilty of a crime"" (p.57). His irresponsibility causes the death of those he loves most, and he falls under the control of his creation. The monster exhibits a similar kind of duality arousing sympathy as well as horror in all who hear his tale. He demands our compassion to the extent that we recognize ourselves in his existential loneliness. Rejected by his creator and utterly alone, he learns what he can of human nature by eavesdropping on family cottage dwellers, and he educates himself by reading a few carefully selected titles that have fortuitously fallen across his path, among them Paradise Lost. ""Who was I? What was I? Whence did I?"