Victor Frankenstein Timeline and Summary
- Victor is born in Geneva to parents Alphonse and Caroline Frankenstein.
- His parents adopt Elizabeth with the intention that when the kids are older, they will marry.
- He reads the work of alchemists and forms his view of the world and of science.
- His mother dies of scarlet fever only a few weeks before he is to go away to college. On her deathbed, she again says how much she wants Victor to marry Elizabeth.
- Victor attends the university of Ingolstadt, where he studies chemistry and natural philosophy.
- He becomes a star pupil at the university, learning all his professors can teach him in a few short years.
- After that, he has to take his studies further on his own. It is then that he decides to create the spark of life in an inanimate thing.
- He creates a monster and runs away from it.
- He has a nightmare about Elizabeth and his mother’s corpse.
- He runs into Henry Clerval and falls ill.
- Henry nurses him back to health over a period of months.
- They study "Oriental" languages together at Ingolstadt.
- Victor and Henry return home because Victor’s brother, William, has been murdered.
- Victor sees the monster in the woods on the way home when he is locked out of the gates of Geneva for the night; he realizes the monster killed William.
- He is too afraid to tell anyone his secret, and partly because of his silence, an innocent, Frankenstein family servant, Justine Moritz, is executed.
- Victor feels remorse and goes off into the mountains. He runs into the monster there.
- The monster asks him to listen to his story, and Victor consents, going to an ice cave with him.
- The monster asks Victor to make him a companion, and Victor reluctantly consents.
- He goes back to Geneva and delays making the companion for the monster.
- His father thinks Victor doesn’t want to marry Elizabeth. But he does. Really.
- He says he needs to go on a journey first.
- Henry accompanies him to England, but Victor can’t work with him around.
- He sends Henry to stay with his friends in Scotland.
- The monster watches Victor closely, and he sees the monster looking through the window one day while he is working on the she-monster on the desolate island of Orkney.
- Victor realizes what he might release upon humanity if he creates a second monster, so he destroys it and dumps its body parts into the lake that night.
- The winds prevent him from returning to shore.
- He thinks about drowning himself.
- Instead, he sails up to a nearby town, where the people accuse him of murder.
- The magistrate takes him to view the body. It is Henry.
- Victor falls ill for two months.
- He is in jail.
- When he recovers, his father visits him and he gets letters from Elizabeth asking him if he loves another woman.
- The town magistrate takes pity on him. He is acquitted of the charges.
- He rests in Paris and returns to Geneva.
- He is fearful of the monster, who vowed to be with him on his wedding night, but he goes ahead with wedding plans, not realizing the monster’s true intent.
- He marries Elizabeth.
- On their wedding night, while Victor is preparing to fight the monster, the monster kills Elizabeth instead of him.
- Victor returns to Geneva. His father dies of grief to hear the news of Elizabeth’s death.
- He swears revenge on the monster, and starts out chasing him. He ends up with a dog sled in the Arctic Ocean. Well, not literally in the ocean, but pretty close. On, perhaps.
- Near death, he boards Captain Walton’s ship, and resting, he tells Walton his story.
- He urges the ship not to give up if it ever gets unstuck from the ice.
- He dies.
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