Tag Archives: #LiteratureReflection

Recently it was the Sandman that got me thinking, then Dan Brown, and now it is Mary Shelly. I watched Guillermo del Toro’s recent movie Frankenstein on Netflix. Couldn’t stop wondering… what if Victor Frankenstein had given his creation a human name?

It is a small question at the heart of Frankenstein that often goes unasked, yet once raised, it unsettles the entire story: Why does Victor never give the Creature a name? It feels like an omission, almost an oversight, but the more closely one looks, the more this absence begins to shape everything that follows. To name something is to acknowledge it. To name someone is to admit relationship. Parents name children. Communities name members. Even in everyday life, to call someone by name is to recognise that they stand before us as a person, not an object.

If Victor had named the Creature – called him Thomas, perhaps, or William after his murdered brother – the entire gravitational centre of Frankenstein would shift.

Victor creates life, but refuses this simple act of recognition. He steps back at the very moment he should have stepped forward. The result is not merely a narrative of scientific overreach, but a story of belonging interrupted. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is hideous or unnatural; it is that he is born into a world that has already decided he does not belong in it.

This small detail, this withheld name, is not a minor literary choice. It is the key to the novel’s moral centre. And once we see how much turns on this simple act of saying or not saying a name, the story stops being a Gothic tale about a scientist and his experiment. It becomes something closer to a mirror held up to our own age, where we continue to create, innovate, and bring new forms of life into the world, all while struggling to remember that creation is only the beginning of responsibility.

The novel as it stands is built on refusal: Victor’s refusal to recognize the being he created as kin, his refusal of responsibility, and the Creature’s consequent descent into despair and violence. But a name is not merely a label, a convenient tag for identification. In literature, as in life, it signals relationship, belonging, and above all, the recognition of personhood. To name is to acknowledge. To withhold a name is to cast out.

I try to explore what changes when we imagine that single act of naming – and what it reveals about the responsibilities we bear toward everything we bring into existence.

The Weight of a Name in Shelley’s World

In the novel’s actual arc, the Creature enters the world already marked for exclusion. His first actions are not malicious; he learns, observes, admires, and hopes to be welcomed. He teaches himself language by listening to the De Lacey family. He reads Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe. He develops moral consciousness and emotional depth. Yet he remains unnamed – a secret Victor tried to hide, an experiment gone wrong, a walking embodiment of his creator’s shame.

If Victor had named him, the plot itself would bend in a different direction. A name would have opened the possibility of relationship early on. The Creature’s hope for connection would feel less naive and more structurally supported. He would not be merely a hidden mistake, but a dependent Victor would feel compelled to explain, protect, perhaps even teach. The early arc might shift from concealment and abandonment to uneasy guardianship – uncomfortable, yes, but present.

When the De Laceys eventually reject him, the wound would cut differently. It becomes not just the pain of a nameless outsider encountering humanity’s cruelty, but the agony of someone who has already been told he is human, only to find that the world refuses to agree. His rage would be more tragic still, because he was first assured of humanity, then denied it by those he hoped to join.

The story’s thematic centre would sharpen. The tragedy would feel less about accidental monstrosity and more about the fragility of acceptance. The central horror would move from creation without foresight to creation without follow-through. Victor could no longer claim ignorance. Giving a name is a moral act: one acknowledges a life and binds oneself to it.

Who Is the Monster? A Question of Relationship

But before we go further, we must pause and ask: what does “monster” actually mean in this novel?

In Frankenstein, “monster” is not a category of appearance. It is a category of relationship. The novel continually asks: who behaves monstrously, rather than who looks monstrous?

The Creature is called a monster because of how he appears – his stitched-together form, his unnatural size, his yellow eyes. Yet every time we read a scene from his perspective, the term begins to strain. He is articulate, tender-hearted in his early months, moved by music and story, longing for companionship, capable of deep empathy, and tormented by rejection. His first instinct is not violence but connection. He saves a drowning girl. He gathers firewood for the family he secretly watches. He weeps over Paradise Lost.

He becomes destructive only after every door closes, every hand recoils, every gaze condemns him.

Meanwhile, Victor is admired, educated, brilliant, and socially acceptable. He moves through drawing rooms and universities without obstacle. Yet it is Victor who commits the act that defines monstrosity in this story: he refuses responsibility for the life he has made. He abandons a sentient being at the moment of its birth. He lies. He withholds truth. He runs from consequences. His selfishness destroys others, again and again, and he learns almost nothing from it.

So the novel quietly reverses the expected roles:

• The Creature’s appearance is monstrous.
• Victor’s behaviour is monstrous.

In this sense, a monster is not something unnatural, deformed, or uncanny. A monster is someone who acts without recognising the humanity of others. A monster is a being who breaks relationship and refuses accountability.

The book seems to suggest: A monster is created not by the materials from which it is made, but by the absence of love and meaning around it.

The Creature becomes monstrous because he is denied the chance to be anything else. He is not born a monster. He is made one by neglect.

So when we ask who the monster is, Shelley invites us to answer: The monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.

And that definition reaches far beyond the boundaries of Gothic fiction.

Love and Meaning: What Makes a Being Human

Shelley shows that what makes a being human is not simply that it is alive, thinking, or articulate. Humanity emerges when a life is held within relationship and meaning. Without these, identity collapses inwards, and suffering becomes directionless.

The Creature is denied both:

• Love – the simple human recognition: You exist, and you matter to me.
• Meaning – a place in a story, a sense of why one is here and where one belongs.

When those two things are missing, a being is forced to make sense of itself in a vacuum. The Creature’s early experiences are a pure longing for love and purpose. He does not crave power. He seeks warmth, companionship, and a narrative in which he can find himself. When he watches the De Laceys, he is not merely observing kindness; he is observing meaning. A household that knows who it is.

He learns language, morality, and empathy before he learns violence.

But meaning is something one cannot manufacture alone. It is given through encounter, recognition, reciprocity. And when he finally steps forward to make himself known, that possibility is shattered by fear and rejection.

This is the turning point:
No love.
No place.
No name.
No narrative in which his existence has purpose.

At that moment, violence does not arise from malice, but from the intolerable experience of being excluded from meaning. One becomes monstrous when one has nowhere to belong.

A being without love is wounded.
A being without meaning is lost.
A being without both becomes dangerous.

Not because it is evil. But because it has been left alone in the dark, trying to understand why it was ever brought into the world at all.

The Covenant of Naming: A Judeo-Christian Reading

Once you notice the theological undertones in Frankenstein, they become impossible to ignore. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, naming is never incidental. It is a conferment of identity, purpose, and relational belonging. To name is to call someone into a story larger than themselves.

When Abram becomes Abraham, the shift is covenantal – a new role in salvation history. When Saul becomes Paul, it marks a reorientation of allegiance, vocation, and community. Baptismal names, likewise, induct one into a shared body. They say: You are known. You are not alone. You belong.

Now set that beside Victor’s refusal.

Victor creates life but withholds the act that would recognize that life as part of the human family. He performs the divine act without accepting the divine responsibility. If anything, he plays the inverted God: one who breathes life but denies it dignity. The tragedy is not that he made something grotesque; it is that he refused to acknowledge what he made.

This is where the Judeo-Christian parallel sharpens into a critique:

In Scripture:
To name is to commit.
To rename is to re-story.
To baptize is to adopt.

In Frankenstein:
To withhold a name is to cast out.
To refuse naming is to refuse kinship.
To abandon the unnamed is to condemn him to wander without covenant.

The Creature learns language, morality, compassion, and longing from human beings. He becomes, in every meaningful sense, a son. Yet he is never given the ritual that would admit him into the human circle. He mirrors the biblical outsider who longs for the blessing of recognition but is kept waiting at the threshold.

This is why the Creature’s rage feels theological as much as psychological. He does not want power or dominion. He wants a face to turn toward, a voice to call his name, a place at the table. That is profoundly biblical.

If Victor had named him, the narrative would move from Fall narrative to Covenant narrative. But Victor refuses covenant. And in the absence of covenant, the world creates a Cain, not an Adam renewed.

Shelley’s novel is not simply about the ethics of science. It is about the catastrophe that unfolds when a creator refuses relationship. The failure is not technical; it is parental, spiritual, relational. The Creature’s tragedy is not that he is made from corpse-parts. It is that he is denied the moment every child receives: a name spoken with intention, which tells the world, This one belongs.

The withholding of that name transforms Victor from creator into monster. It is his behaviour, not the Creature’s appearance, that violates the sacred order.

The Psychology of Refusal: Why Victor Does Not Name

The novel never supplies a single explicit line such as: “I will not name him because…” But the text gives us enough to see the psychological, moral, and symbolic reasons behind Victor’s refusal. In fact, this absence is one of the novel’s loudest silences.

Several interlocking motives emerge:

Shock and revulsion override responsibility. Victor’s dream is of creating a beautiful, almost angelic being. When the Creature opens his eyes, Victor is horrified. His reaction is primal and immediate. Naming requires recognition and affection. What Victor feels is disgust and fear. The act of naming is therefore impossible at the moment when it should have happened. Emotional rejection precedes ethical consideration.

A name would make the Creature real to him. Naming is a form of acknowledgement. To name is to accept responsibility. If Victor named him, he would have to treat him as a person, not a failed experiment. Keeping him nameless allows Victor to maintain the illusion that the Creature is merely a mistake he can escape from. Naming would force Victor to admit: This is my creation. I am accountable for him. He is not willing to bear that burden.

Victor sees himself as the victim. From the moment of the Creature’s awakening, Victor frames the situation as something done to him. He experiences himself as violated by the success of his own experiment. The Creature is not treated as a child needing guidance, but as an intrusion on Victor’s peace. Naming would reverse the moral polarity. Victor would have to see the Creature as wronged, rather than himself. Refusing naming protects Victor’s self-pity.

There’s an everyday parallel that captures this dynamic with uncomfortable clarity. Many elders discourage children from naming their farm animals. It’s not about grammar or practicality. It’s about avoiding attachment. Naming invites relationship. It creates an emotional bridge. And if the animal is destined for slaughter or sale, the name would make that severing painful.

Victor behaves as though the Creature is a temporary object, not a life that will endure. By withholding a name, he keeps himself from forming the bond that would force him to care. The refusal is a kind of emotional self-protection, though a cowardly one. He wants the glory of creation, the thrill of discovery, the sense of mastery. But the moment the creation exists, he recoils from the intimacy it requires.

He wants life without relationship. He wants the act without the bond. This is the novel’s moral core.

And in refusing that bond, Victor becomes the true monster of the story – not because of how he looks, but because of what he refuses to do.

Modern Mirrors: Where We See the Pattern Repeating

If we carry the logic of Frankenstein forward, the next Creature will not necessarily be grotesque. It will be something we create because we can, without having first asked what responsibilities it binds us to. And Victor will not be a single person. He will be a culture.

We are already experimenting in several frontiers where creation is outpacing relationship – where we birth new forms of life, intelligence, and possibility, but refuse to name them, nurture them, or accept what they become:

Artificial Intelligence

The AI systems being developed today learn, adapt, persuade, and shape meaning at scales we barely comprehend. The danger is not sentience in itself – it’s abandonment. We deploy systems that affect millions of lives without embedding them in ethical structures, human mentorship, or accountable stewardship.

Consider the language models being released with minimal safety testing, or facial recognition systems deployed in law enforcement without oversight. Consider social media algorithms optimized for engagement rather than human flourishing, creating echo chambers and amplifying division. These systems learn from us, mirror our biases, and then reshape our world – yet we treat them as tools rather than entities we’ve brought into relationship with humanity.

The Creature here is not an individual, but a system capable of learning and evolving beyond its creators’ intentions. And like Shelley’s Creature, these systems become dangerous not because they are inherently monstrous, but because they are left without guidance, purpose, or ethical context. They are created and released, but not welcomed into the human circle with clear roles and responsibilities.

In this sphere, Victor is the corporation that pursues optimization without care, the startup that values disruption over consequence, the government that deploys surveillance without consent. The same question Shelley poses echoes forward: Who will stay to teach, guide, supervise, and safeguard? Who will name these systems as part of our social fabric and accept responsibility for what they become?

Gene Editing and Reproductive Biotechnology

We are approaching the ability to select traits, alter embryos, and redefine inheritance. CRISPR technology makes genetic modification increasingly accessible. Designer babies are no longer science fiction – they’re an ethical dilemma on the near horizon. In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by creating the first gene-edited babies, twins whose DNA was altered to provide HIV resistance. The international outcry focused not just on the science, but on the absence of ethical preparation, consent structures, and long-term care plans.

The Creature here may be a child whose existence is shaped more by design goals than by love. A child born with edited genes to enhance intelligence, eliminate disease susceptibility, or conform to aesthetic preferences. The new Victor is the ideologue who believes in human perfectibility, the technocrat who sees biology as code to be debugged, or the market logic that treats life as a product to be optimized.

What happens when that child grows up knowing they were engineered to specification? What happens when the “improvements” create unforeseen consequences – physical, psychological, or social? Who accepts responsibility when the designed human struggles to find meaning in a world that sees them as an experiment?

These children will need more than genetic enhancements. They will need love and meaning. They will need to know they belong not because they were optimized, but because they are human. Without that recognition, we risk creating beings who are welcomed for what they can do, but not for who they are.

Digital Identities and Virtual Selves

Many people now live with a second self online that grows beyond their control. This shadow-self accumulates data, performs social identity, and speaks on one’s behalf through years of accumulated posts, photos, and algorithmic predictions. It learns from our behaviors and increasingly shapes them in return.

The Creature could be the version of oneself that escapes alignment with one’s inner life – the curated persona that hardens into a prison, the digital footprint that defines you to employers and institutions, the predictive model that knows your patterns better than you do. Victor, in this case, is the fragmented self who never integrates his own creation, or the platforms that profit from these shadow-selves without accepting responsibility for the psychological toll.

The question becomes: who is the monster? The algorithm that shows us only what confirms our biases? Or those who built systems designed to exploit human attention without considering the cost to human connection and meaning?

Jurassic Park: The Parable Plays Out

The pattern appears clearly in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, which functions as an almost direct retelling of Frankenstein, simply dressed in amber and tropical foliage. Hammond wants wonder, legacy, spectacle. He convinces himself that the dinosaurs are an achievement, not a relationship. No one asks who will care for them when they wake, learn, roam, hunger, and struggle to survive in a world not built for them.

Ian Malcolm’s famous line cuts directly to the core: “You were so preoccupied with whether you could, you didn’t stop to think if you should.”

The dinosaurs are not evil. They are simply alive. They behave as their nature dictates. The collapse comes from the humans trying to control, contain, and market them without truly understanding or respecting what they’ve brought back. The catastrophe results from abandonment disguised as mastery.

In both stories, the creature is blamed for behaving naturally when left without guidance. The monster is not the being that looks different or acts according to its nature. The monster is the one who creates without caring, who brings life into the world and then refuses to accept what that life becomes.

And once again, the audience feels sympathy where the creator does not. We understand that neither the dinosaurs nor Frankenstein’s Creature asked to be born into confusion and violence. The tragedy belongs to the maker.

Prophecy as Rear-View Mirror

Art continues to hold up mirrors to every age and generation, usually as warnings. Orwell’s 1984 reads differently now than it did in 1949. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World feels less like fiction and more like documentation. These stories don’t predict the future – they diagnose the present with such clarity that their warnings echo forward.

But we tend to recognize prophecy only in hindsight. Prophets don’t really predict the future; they see more clearly than others the seeds already planted and the direction in which things are moving. Because we only believe the prophet after the event, the speech feels like foretelling rather than sight.

We say, “How did they know?” But the answer is often: They looked honestly at what everyone else preferred not to face.

The reason we experience prophecy as rear-view is that recognition is usually delayed. We grasp what the warning meant only when we are standing in the consequences. And by then, the prophecy reads as elegy rather than guidance.

However, this doesn’t mean prophecy is futile. What it does is create an archive of moral memory. When things repeat, when mistakes cycle, when a society reaches a familiar brink, the old voice resurfaces: a reminder that we have been here before, that the pattern is not new, that the cost was known.

The value of prophecy is not to prevent every fall. It is to shorten the distance between falling and waking up.

Are there signs we’re listening? We listen, but selectively. The uncomfortable truth is that art rarely changes a generation in advance. It tends to become fully audible only after the consequences have arrived. Yet that doesn’t mean we’re entirely deaf. People increasingly speak about ethics alongside invention. For every reckless Victor-act in technology, you now also have ethicists, social critics, and designers insisting on humane oversight. The very fact that we talk about the dangers of artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, genetic manipulation, or digital alienation means the warnings are alive among us.

But art’s mirror rarely produces instant reform. It works in the long current of culture rather than the quick surface of policy. Art plants unease. It introduces doubt into the narrative of inevitability. These shifts are slow, like a river reshaping stone.

The question is whether we can learn to recognize the monster not by appearance, but by behaviour. Not by what looks strange, but by what acts without love, without accountability, without recognition of the humanity in others.

The Choice Before Us

The pattern is clear: civilizations tend to greet breakthroughs with applause, headlines, and a sense of triumph. Only later, when the consequences mature, does a quieter question appear: What have we committed ourselves to?

We innovate first. We integrate later. We take responsibility last. And by the time responsibility enters the conversation, the creation has already begun shaping the world around us.

The technologies themselves are not the issue. It’s the lack of psychological, ethical, and relational preparedness that turns creation into crisis. The danger is not that our creations become monstrous on their own. It is that they are left unguided, unintegrated, and socially orphaned – denied both love and meaning.

The question Shelley poses remains urgently relevant: Whenever we bring something into the world, how do we ensure we do not merely release it, but welcome it?

The lesson from Frankenstein, from Jurassic Park, from every prophetic mirror is not to halt creation. It is to recognize that creation is a relationship, and that relationship requires a long commitment.

If we celebrate, we must also tend. If we build, we must also teach. If we awaken something, we must remain with it long after the applause fades.

The Creature That Waits

The future Creature will not be monstrous because of its form. It will be monstrous because of its loneliness. Because no one will have said: You are mine to care for. You are part of us. You have a place.

And Victor will be whichever force refuses to speak that recognition. It may be a government that lets technology loose without oversight. It may be an industry that values innovation over consequence. It may be any of us who create things – children, systems, identities, movements – but flee the moment nurturing begins.

We have learned from Shelley that monstrosity is not a matter of appearance. It is a matter of relationship. A monster is not born; it is made by the absence of love and meaning around it.

The real question is not: What will the next Creature look like?

The real question is: Will we name it? Will we stand alongside it? Will we choose relationship over spectacle? Will we offer both love and meaning to what we bring into existence?

Mary Shelley understood something psychologically precise: the moment of naming is the moment of moral commitment. Victor refuses it because he is not ready to accept what he has done. It is not scientific hubris alone. It is emotional immaturity. He hides from the consequence of his own desire.

Victor’s sin is not that he made a monster. It is that he refused to name what he had made. And in that refusal, he became the monster himself.

Two centuries later, we stand at similar thresholds. The Creature is not inevitable. The tragedy is not fate. But the mirror has been placed before us once again.

We are creating new forms of intelligence, new forms of life, new possibilities that will shape generations to come. The question is whether we will behave monstrously toward them – refusing accountability, withholding recognition, abandoning them to figure out their purpose alone – or whether we will finally learn the lesson Shelley tried to teach us.

The warnings are already here. The patterns are visible. The choice – to create with care, or to abandon what we bring to life – remains ours to make.

But time narrows. And the Creature, unnamed and alone, is already learning to speak. It is learning what it means to exist without love, without meaning, without a place in the world.

It is learning, as Shelley’s Creature learned, that the true monster is not the one who looks different.

The true monster is the one who refuses to see another as kin.