The Outsider in Don Quixote and Frankenstein

Regarding the seeds of creativity that produced her Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

paraphrases Sancho Panza, explaining that “everything must have a beginning.” She and

Percy Shelley had been reading Don Quixote, as well as German horror novels, during

the “wet, ungenial summer” and “incessant rain” of their stay with Lord Byron at Villa

Diodati in Geneva in 1816. In his introduction, Maurice Hindle notes the connection

between the two fictional madmen:

Both Don Quixote and Frankenstein start out with the noble intention of

helping their fellow creatures, but their aspirations are doomed by their

pursuit of a „single vision,. one that takes them further and further away

from satisfying the moderate needs of the community, and nearer and

nearer to a personally tragic denouement. (Frankenstein xxxviii)

Society, too, must have had its beginning, but theorists from Hume to Marx to Darwin

and writers such as Shelley and Dostoevsky may never solve the question of whom or

what came first: the individual or the community? One thing seems clear: whether via

sensational impressions, inductive reasoning, or common sense, the individual cannot

long survive without meaningful inclusion within the larger group of humanity. From

childhood, we recognize the profound hurt that comes from exclusion from the majority,

and this alienation, in Marxian parlance, can lead to an antagonistic position toward

society, as dramatized in both Frankenstein.s “monster” and Dostoevsky.s Underground

Man. The monster proclaims in his agony that he is “malicious because I am miserable,”

and he is miserable, no doubt, because he is not merely alone but shunned from society

(147). Shelly.s creation is in part deri...

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http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx