The Pursuit & the Ending
Elizabeth’s Death: The Wedding Night
The Creature’s threat — “I shall be with you on your wedding night” — hangs over the novel’s final chapters. Victor, with characteristic self-absorption, interprets this as a threat against his own life. He arms himself on his wedding night, patrolling the house while Elizabeth waits alone in their bedroom. The dramatic irony is devastating: the reader understands that the Creature has promised to take from Victor what Victor took from it — a companion. Victor never considers that Elizabeth, not he, is the target.
When Victor hears Elizabeth’s scream, he rushes to find her dead. He describes her “thrown across the bed, her head hanging down and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” The Creature is watching through the window, pointing at Elizabeth’s body with a “grin” on its face. This image inverts the creation scene: then, Victor looked at the Creature with horror; now, the Creature looks at Victor with triumph. The symmetry is Shelley’s design — Victor denied the Creature a partner, so the Creature denies Victor his.
Elizabeth’s murder is the Creature’s revenge for the destruction of its female companion. Victor misinterprets the wedding night threat because he thinks only of himself. The Creature’s grin at the window mirrors Victor’s horror at creation — both creator and creation now know the agony of losing what they love most.
The Pursuit to the Arctic
After Elizabeth’s death and the subsequent death of his father from grief, Victor has lost everything. He swears to pursue the Creature “until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.” The pursuit takes Victor across Europe and into the frozen Arctic, following the Creature northward. The roles are now reversed: the Creature, once the pursuer of acceptance, now leads Victor on, leaving clues and food to keep him alive. The Creature wants Victor to suffer, not to die quickly.
The Arctic setting is deeply symbolic. The ice and cold represent the emotional wasteland both characters now inhabit: stripped of love, warmth, and human connection. The sublime landscape dwarfs Victor, showing how small his ambitions truly are against the vast indifference of nature. It is here that Walton’s ship finds Victor, half-dead on the ice, and the frame narrative comes full circle.
During the pursuit, the Creature carves messages into trees and rocks, taunting Victor: “Follow me; I seek the everlasting ices of the north, where you will feel the misery of cold and frost to which I am impassive.” The Creature is now completely in control. It chooses the terrain — the frozen north, where its superior physical endurance gives it the advantage. It leaves food for Victor, prolonging his suffering rather than allowing him to die. Shelley reverses the power dynamic: the creation now masters the creator.
The pursuit also reveals Victor’s final obsession. Having lost his family, his friends, and his health to the Creature, he now defines himself entirely by the pursuit. His identity has been consumed by his creation, just as his ambition consumed him at Ingolstadt. Shelley suggests that Victor has become a mirror of the Creature: isolated, driven by a single consuming purpose, and incapable of any other existence.
Victor’s Death and Final Warning
Victor dies aboard Walton’s ship, still refusing to fully accept responsibility. Even in his final moments, he vacillates. He tells Walton: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.” This is a genuine warning — but it is immediately undermined when Victor adds that another person “may succeed” where he failed. Even on his deathbed, Victor cannot entirely condemn his own ambition. He regrets the consequences but not the impulse.
Shelley uses Victor’s death to force a final question on the reader: is Victor a tragic hero destroyed by a fatal flaw, or is he a moral coward who never once put others before himself? His final words suggest both. He is capable of wisdom (“how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge”) but incapable of truly changing (“another may succeed”). Shelley leaves the judgment to the reader.
Victor’s final words are contradictory. He warns Walton that the “acquirement of knowledge” is dangerous, but then suggests another scientist “may succeed” where he failed. Shelley shows that Victor cannot fully renounce his ambition, even as he dies from its consequences. His self-awareness never translates into genuine moral change.
The Creature’s Grief
After Victor’s death, the Creature boards Walton’s ship and finds its creator’s body. The scene is one of the most powerful in the novel. The Creature weeps over Victor, calling him “generous and self-devoted being” — a description that is both sincere and deeply ironic, since the reader knows Victor was rarely generous and never truly self-devoted. The Creature describes itself in its final speech: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”
The word “abortion” is devastating. It means something that was created but should never have been allowed to exist — the failed product of an experiment. “Spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” piles up images of physical contempt. The Creature has fully internalised the world’s rejection. It declares that it will travel to the “most northern extremity of the globe” and build its own funeral pyre. The novel ends with the Creature disappearing into the darkness and distance, its final fate unknown.
Walton’s crew demand that he turn the ship around before they all die in the ice. Walton faces the same choice Victor faced: pursue his dangerous ambition at the cost of others’ lives, or turn back. Unlike Victor, Walton chooses to turn back. He puts the lives of his crew above his personal glory. Shelley uses Walton’s decision to provide the novel’s only moment of moral hope. Victor could not restrain his ambition; Walton can. This suggests that the lesson of Victor’s story is not that ambition is inherently evil, but that it must be tempered by responsibility to others.
Walton’s decision also completes the frame narrative. The novel began with Walton sailing north, full of ambition; it ends with him turning south, having learned from Victor’s example. This circular structure reinforces Shelley’s message: the purpose of Victor’s story is to change the behaviour of those who hear it.