This might be a little late, but I would like to briefly go over the third section of Frankenstein before continuing onto the main topic, as I seem to feel that leaving a discussion post partway doesn’t seem correct. The third section of Frankenstein brought about some twists and how everything the once young and brilliant man Victor Frankenstein was brought to ruin by his own creation. I have already described before that his creation was more than just a hulking figure with a small mind, but actually that of an educated philosopher that can match a human’s intelligence. In short, Victor’s quest to find his creation and end its existence fails, and when Victor finally stills, his creation attends his deathbed for a brief moment. In that moment, I felt that the creation had some form of bond or synergy with his creator as the creation stated that he would soon follow with his own funeral pyre. This leaves some to wonder if the creation had been in some part brought back to the servile role since he gained nothing, but anguish and grief from his path of destruction; but back to the main topic.
There is a relevant fact that I would like to bring into this topic, regarding The Thing (1982). This movie had more to it than just a monster that destroyed everything in its path. The thing was in some sorts like Frankenstein’s creation. It was an alien that attempted to blend in with the humans on the Antarctic human outpost. Unfortunately, that was the only aspect that seemed to relate; there were the non-relevance parts such as assimilating, mutilating and attempting to gnaw of parts of the other humans. The thing left another concept aside from the monster. It conveyed the feelings of insecurity among humans when faced with an identity crisis. The Thing was attempting to imitate any of the other humans and that brought about a sense of distrust among the other men. This sense of distrust made the men turn on each other for fear of their own safety and surprisingly, this was the main factor that actually killed most of the men. The Thing didn’t cause as much destruction as you would have thought. The Thing may have assimilated and killed a few dogs and a couple of the men, but it was the humans that blew up the outpost, who torched the storehouse and killed two fellow humans who were not affected on purpose. Eventually, like most formula movies (movies that follow a typical formula such as love triangles, two survivors, and cheesy happy endings) there are two remaining people, but at the cost of razing the whole facility just to wipe out a single monster. Let’s take a moment and consider this question; why do you think that bringing a monster or something that seems like a monster into a human setting set the people into crazed actions?
One more thing to mention would be Dubois’s work The Comet, an interesting piece that gave an interesting perspective of a post-apocalyptic world. As Christina Crockett mentioned in her post, “Dubois wrote the story around 1920’s” when the heat of segregation was in full throttle and his works finally became publicized after his death; when segregation was finally started to diminish. I would imagine that if Dubois was brought to this current time frame, he might have had more opportunity to voice a similar concept of more mainstream fictional works, because the fictional story he wrote was during the pressure of segregation and when African-American writers were not that well known. These unfortunate events however gave him the tools to write a completely unique story that incorporated some aspects of release from the segregation lot and gave the feel of the post-apocalyptic, more of a divine feeling of being the only two survivors in a world until those outside of New York arrive.
