Frankenstein is a novel haunted by the spectre of death. Not yet a quarter of the
way through the novel, the reader will encounter in Justine the fifth orphan (after
Walton and his sister, Caroline, and Elizabeth). Beyond this repeated pattern, death
has touched each chapter of the novel, first as Walton recounts how he inherited a
fortune upon the death of an unnamed cousin (I:L1:4and note), the decline of Alphonse
Frankenstein's friend Beaufort (I:1:2), the sudden demise of Caroline Frankenstein
(I:2:2), Victor's nocturnal visits to vaults and charnel houses (I:3:3), his association
of his Creature with mummies and ghouls (I:4:4), and the death of Justine's three
siblings and mother in this paragraph. The actual context for this narrative should,
of course, not be forgotten, an unexplored reach of the Arctic wilderness where the
sight of another human being (I:L4:4) provokes "unqualified wonder."