Fractured Reflections: Frankenstein and the Postmodern Mirror (Lil Plim Slizzy - 5th)

Intro

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The glint of lightning in a stormy sky, the fevered notes of creation, and a creature stitched together from the remnants of dead men. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an iconic text of the Romantic and Gothic traditions. But what happens when we resurrect this novel and view it through the fragmented, skeptical lens of Postmodernism? The result is not simply a reanimation of a classic but a reinterpretation that destabilizes meaning, authorial authority, and narrative truth. Postmodernism, with its embrace of irony, metafiction, and pastiche, transforms Frankenstein from a cautionary tale about scientific hubris into a multilayered critique of identity, authorship, and the illusion of coherence.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------When read as a postmodern text, Frankenstein becomes a self-reflecting narrative about the instability of knowledge and the constructed nature of reality, a theme echoed in Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Unnecessary Things,” Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Making a Fist,” and the Gorillaz’s song “Humility,” all of which interrogate the self through fragmentation, dislocation, and blurred boundaries between perception and reality.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------ The Fragmented Self and the Death of the Author ------------

One hallmark of Postmodernism is its emphasis on the fractured self and the unreliability of narrative truth. In Frankenstein, this is evident through the layered narrative structure. Walton recounts Frankenstein’s story, who in turn recounts the Creature’s. This narrative within a narrative undermines any sense of objective truth. Each voice is unreliable, each account subjective. Victor’s portrayal of the Creature as a monster is contradicted by the Creature’s own articulation and emotional plea for companionship: “I am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?” Shelley challenges the notion of a single, stable identity, presenting characters whose self-understanding collapses under social and psychological pressure.

This fracturing of identity and truth aligns with Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Unnecessary Things,” a postmodern short story where reality is filtered through absurdism and material decay. The protagonist hoards seemingly useless objects, but

each item pulsates with memory and longing, blurring the boundary between object and emotion, past and present. Like Shelley, Tolstaya destabilizes the boundary between internal and external worlds, showing a character who is both defined and deformed by the crushing weight of existence

----------------------- Irony, Alienation, and the Hyperreal -----------------------

Postmodernism also thrives on irony, intertextuality, and a sense of alienation, qualities mirrored in Nye’s “Making a Fist” and Gorillaz’s “Humility.” Nye’s poem, a deceptively simple meditation on survival and resilience, ironically complicates the idea of agency. As the speaker recalls her mother’s words, “When you can no longer make a fist,” the gesture becomes both literal and symbolic. The poem resists resolution, floating between memory and meaning, echoing Frankenstein’s own unresolved tensions about responsibility, creation, and the power to act.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gorillaz’s “Humility,” with its animated avatar frontman 2-D and virtual band identity, embodies Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, where simulation replaces reality. The song’s mellow tones and visuals conceal a deeper anxiety about isolation in a digital age. Like Victor Frankenstein, who becomes alienated from both society and the monster he creates, the song’s protagonist drifts through a sun-soaked landscape, disconnected from anything real. This artificiality and alienation parallel Victor’s disillusionment: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.” His knowledge births not enlightenment, but existential dread. Irony saturates all these works. In Frankenstein, Victor aims to conquer death but instead becomes its servant. Nye’s fist is both a sign of life and a symbol of pain. Gorillaz’s sunny visuals contrast with lyrical introspection. These texts resist coherent moral or emotional closure, a quintessential postmodern technique that forces readers to sit with contradiction and ambiguity.

--------------------------------------- In Conclusion ---------------------------------------

When Victor's Creature peers into the water and sees a reflection he cannot reconcile with his self-concept, he becomes the first postmodern protagonist, not because he is monstrous, but because he understands that identity is not innate, but imposed, edited, and endlessly remade. In a Postmodern light, Frankenstein is not a mere tale of ambition gone awry but a complex meditation on identity, authorship, and the elusive nature of truth. It aligns with other postmodern works in its fragmented structure, its ironic tone, and its interrogation of the boundaries between creator and creation, object and subject, real and simulated. Shelley’s novel, reanimated in the cultural context of digital modernity, becomes startlingly prescient,a text that, like Tolstaya’s junk drenched world, Nye’s metaphoric fist, or the Gorillaz’s pixelated persona, reflects a world where meaning is unstable, memory unreliable, and the self endlessly reconstructed.