Writelike Mary Shelley: Frankenstein's monster's lament

Let's look at how this snippet works.

We'll break it into three chunks:

This snippet is fundamentally about making a complaint:

• Grievance: The monster makes a complaint to the person responsible.
• Comparison 1: The monster compares their situation to something bad.
• Comparison 2: The monster reinforces their point with an even more extreme comparison.

☝️  That's the structure we will work with in this lesson.

👇  But it's also worth highlighting a deeper pattern. 

What you can see is that each comparison follows a similar pattern:

• The monster introduces a point of comparison
• Describes that situation
• Then pivots to themselves
• And describes their own situation

By repeating this, Shelley creates a parallelism: two identical patterns which reinforce each other through their matching structures.

And if you were to look at the specific choices of comparison, you will notice they are two polar extremes: God and Satan.

We're not going to get bogged down in this level of detail in this lesson, but we wanted to highlight these patterns here in case you happen to find them useful as you're working on your own version.