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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9610204" data-attributes="member: 18">But many, perhaps most people disagree - hence the fairly conventional interpretation that the monster is, at worst, the lesser of two evils. It really just comes down to that.Whether the book agrees or disagrees is unclear, and I'm not sure anyone managed to get it out of Mary Shelly.I don't see it and I think it's very common to not see that.Because one of them is a cunning child who has had no moral education (except possibly Milton, good lord), and no upbringing, love, or kindness in the world at all. At worst the monster is a broken machine, cursed by the failings of his creator. High IQ doesn't give you morality if you're cast adrift in the world. The fact that the monster kills to try and motivate and mess with von Frankenstein, in this context, is proof that it is immature - this is exactly the sort of thing an angry three-year-old might do, had it the power and cunning to do so. If anything given what has happened to him he behaves a little better than one might expect (and I think this is sometimes held against him, even).Whereas the other one is a rich, well-educated, extremely intelligent adult man who had what we can only suspect was a good upbringing, but who is nothing but self-pitying and self-regarding. Even when people die, von Frankenstein seems to care more about how that makes him feel than what actually happened! He's genuinely a shockingly awful man.</blockquote>

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