The Pursuit & the Ending
The Murder of Elizabeth
On his wedding night, Victor arms himself and patrols the house, convinced the Creature’s threat was directed at him. He leaves Elizabeth alone in their room. When he hears her scream, he rushes in to find her dead: “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” The Gothic imagery — the lifeless body, distorted features, hair covering the face — mirrors the creation scene in reverse: where Victor once brought dead matter to life, the Creature now brings death to the living.
Victor’s failure to protect Elizabeth is a structural echo of his failure to nurture the Creature. In both cases, he is absorbed in his own concerns and fails to see the obvious threat. The Creature watches through the window — “a grin was on the face of the monster” — paralleling the “grin” it wore at its creation. Shelley closes the circle: the smile the creator rejected has become the smile of the destroyer. Everything the Creature was denied — love, a partner, a wedding night — it now takes from Victor.
Elizabeth’s murder is the creation scene in reverse: Victor once brought dead matter to life; now the Creature brings death to life. The Creature’s grin through the window echoes its newborn smile, turning innocence into menace. Victor’s failure to protect Elizabeth mirrors his failure to nurture the Creature — in both cases, his self-absorption leads to destruction.
The Arctic Pursuit
After Elizabeth’s death and his father’s death from grief, Victor pursues the Creature across Europe and into the Arctic. The pursuit reverses their original roles: Victor, the creator, is now the one chasing; the Creature, once the pursuer of human connection, now flees. The Arctic setting is sublime — vast, desolate, and utterly indifferent to human suffering. Shelley places the final confrontation in the most inhospitable landscape on Earth, symbolising the emotional wasteland both characters now inhabit.
The Creature leaves food for Victor along the trail, keeping him alive so the pursuit can continue. This detail is deeply disturbing: the Creature wants Victor to suffer as long as possible. But it can also be read as the Creature’s last perverse act of connection — Victor is the only being who acknowledges the Creature’s existence. Their relationship, however destructive, is the only relationship either of them has left.
Victor dies aboard Walton’s ship, exhausted by the pursuit. His final words to Walton are telling: even on his deathbed, he cannot decide whether his creation was right or wrong. He warns Walton against ambition but also says: “‘yet another may succeed’.” This ambiguity is deliberate — Shelley refuses to give Victor a neat moral resolution. He dies as he lived: brilliant, tormented, and unable to take full responsibility for what he has done.
The Creature’s Final Speech
The Creature appears over Victor’s dead body and delivers its final speech to Walton. This is one of the most powerful passages in the novel. The Creature mourns Victor: “That is also my victim! In his murder my crimes are consummated.” The word “consummated” (meaning completed or fulfilled) links death to marriage, echoing the wedding-night murder. The Creature is not triumphant — it is devastated. Revenge brought no satisfaction, only emptier isolation.
The Creature declares it will travel to the “most northern extremity of the globe” and build its own funeral pyre: “I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me.” It leaps from the ship window and is “borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.” Shelley ends the novel with ambiguity: we do not see the Creature die. It vanishes into the sublime Arctic, leaving the reader to wonder whether it truly ends or continues to haunt the edges of the world.
The Creature’s final speech reveals that revenge brought no peace: “In his murder my crimes are consummated” shows recognition that destroying Victor destroyed the Creature’s last connection to another being. The planned funeral pyre represents the Creature’s only remaining choice: self-destruction. Shelley’s message is that the cycle of revenge ultimately annihilates both creator and creation.
The novel ends where it began: with Walton in the Arctic. His crew demand they turn back south. Walton yields to them: he abandons the quest and turns the ship for home, heeding the warning Victor gave but could not follow himself. What Shelley leaves ambiguous is not Walton’s choice but the Creature’s ending. It is borne away into darkness and distance, and we never see it die. The moral question returns to the reader. Will humanity learn from Victor’s mistake? Will ambition be tempered by responsibility? Walton’s retreat suggests the warning can be heard, but the Creature’s unwitnessed fate leaves the novel’s final question open.