‘His eyes were white as the sockets they were in’ and his lips were ‘straight black.’ The monster speaks by muttering ‘inarticulate sounds’ and he has a grin. When Frankenstein looks at his creation he is frightened both by the sounds it makes which are its attempt to speak and it is also frightening because of the way one hand stretches out and because he can’t understand what he is saying. In a way, the writer is describing the fear of the unknown and how we are all frightened of what we do not understand. Frankenstein calls his monster a ‘demonical corpse’ because it seems as though he has created a demon. It took nearly two years to make the monster and Frankenstein must feel that, because the monster was not like he had expected that it was all a waste of time. He must have also felt depressed and this would have made his fear worse.
The next monster I will write about is Scrooge. This character is different from the one in ‘Frankenstein’ because he is human. I think that the monster in ‘Frankenstein’ has the most immediate effect on the reader because it is its appearance that is so frightening. Scrooge is a human being and we do not expect a human being to be a monster. However, Scrooge was a mean old man and was not friendly to anyone. He had no sympathy or respect for poor people. The writer makes you feel that Scrooge has no feelings and shows no emotion. He seems cruel because of the way he treats people.
The author tries to indicate that Scrooge is cold hearted by comparing him to cold weather conditions. For example,
“No wind that blew was bitterer than he.” Dickens uses lots of words to do with the cold: ‘iced’, ‘frosty’, ‘froze’ and he is using this words to build up an image of Scrooge being like the sort of weather that we all hate and that he is cold and frozen inside. He is cold-hearted.
People do not communicate with Scrooge because they see him as a character with no time for others. Some people are afraid of him.
‘Nobody stopped him in the street.’ The author does not like Scrooge and he shows this because he describes how he does not care about others or what they think of him. This is the viewpoint that the writer gives to the reader and he does it by using the third person so this definitely affects our opinion of Scrooge. He gives a deliberately bad impression of Scrooge at the beginning of the novel so the reader is gripped and wants to know more, wondering if Scrooge will change.
In “War of the worlds” HG Wells describes a Martian. The writer uses the narrator to tell us that he expected to see something like a man emerge something ‘not a little unlike us terrestrial men’ However, the alien was nothing like this. The thing that came out first was “A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the wet cylinder.” He said it was like a snake and compares the alien to other things that we might recognise like, ‘it was as thin as a walking stick’ yet it had a ‘writhing middle.’ The monster had an unusual face; he also had tentacles and a V shaped mouth with two large dark coloured eyes. The key words that explain how horrible it was are “the strange horror of its appearance.” The word horror tells you that it is scary “A big greyish rounded bulk” also makes it sound frightening.
Once again, like ‘Frankenstein’, it is the appearance of the creature that makes it frightening. Comparing it to snakes and describing its writhing movement are the most disgusting parts of the description trading on the idea that no one really likes snakes because we know they can hurt us and we tend to think that because they slither along the ground they are wet and slimy. HG Wells is using our basic fear of snakes to create a repulsive feeling about the alien.
In the poem ‘Stealing’ by Carol Anne Duffy the person has stolen a snowman. The poem tells us he stole the snowman because he wanted ‘a mate with a mind as cold as a slice of ice.’ He has also stolen cameras and mirrors in the past. The person is talking to the reader so the poem is written in the first person as if in answer to a question.
‘The most unusual thing I ever stole?’ We might feel angry by what he has done because he has stolen something from someone else for no reason. This is why he might be thought of as a monster. However, we might feel sorry for the person because he is lonely and bored and nothing to do.
‘I’m so bored I could eat myself.’ There are clues in the poem that he may be a young person because he said, “Part of the thrill was knowing that children would cry in the morning.” This shows he might be a child because he knows if he woke up and his snowman had gone he would cry, so in a way he might be identifying with the children. It also makes you think, when he says, ‘Life’s tough’ that he has had a hard life and that he wants other people to feel his pain. He does say he wants the snowman as a friend, ‘a mate’.
The pieces of writing about “ Frankenstein”, “War of the worlds” and “Stealing” are all written in the first person and this gives an immediate personal effect. However, by using third person Dickens can also give us a complete impression of Scrooge. Of all the descriptions the one I like best is the description of Scrooge because of the clever way Dickens creates a human being with monstrous features and then changes him at the end of the novel.
