Is Frankenstein's Monster Undead?

[RJ 17]

While I am glad that most people agree with the side of the debate that I took with my friend (The Monster is alive, not undead), I was hoping there discussion would be a bit more balanced than it is. Oh well, still a fun random thing to talk about. :3

Dose it change the story at all to think it's one over the other? No? Then why dose' it matter?

It doesn't, this is just a random conversation meant purely for the amusement of those taking part in it.

 

[Fsyco]

It's been years since I read the book, but didn't they say that he had to use a brain of an already-deceased person? Or am I remembering that wrong? Cause I'm pretty sure he counts as undead/re-animated. Although I always thought the 'undead' counted as being alive to some degree, anyway. Since they aren't dead anymore. It's like referring to awake people as "the unasleep". You can really only be one or the other.

Maybe we're being close-minded though. Perhaps we should reject the Death binary and accept that some people don't fit into our standard preconceptions of alive or dead.

 

[RJ 17]

I dunno, Vampires tend to be pretty humanlike, most Vampires in fiction tend to still be capable of higher thought, emotion and feeling. They drink blood because they /have/ to, in the same way a Heroin addict needs to get another hit, and generally ain't just some feral beast, but otherwise they can easily pass for human if they can control the urge to murder everything in sight and depending on the version, avoid daylight. Which they tend to do otherwise they attract angry mobs with pitchforks and torches or burst into flames. Of course there /are/ feral vampires, but that's different to the traditional one.

Yeah, vampires still possess the same traits(for better or worse) of their former self but the difference is that they are now technically 'dead' and kept alive solely by bloodthirst, withering away their free will and poisoning their very sense of self. For vampires that were once good people it is a fate worse than death. It's different from addiction b/c an addict can make a choice to quit, something a vampire will never be capable of. He/she has to purposefully kill other people in order to stay alive.

I wouldn't say that the bloodlust is the driving force behind their life. It sustains them same as Dr. Pepper and sammiches sustain me. :3

It's just their food. Again, look at the most famous example of the vampire: Dracula. In his story he drinks blood, yes, but he doesn't actually kill his prey. In Jonathan's case, he's imprisoned and kept essentially as feeding cattle while in Mina's Dracula falls in love with her and wants her to become his vampire wife. Granted, Dracula is no doubt a sinister and wicked creature of darkness, but it's not as though his mind is addled in some way due to the fact that he drinks blood rather than eating human food.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

It was dead parts, but The Monster was brought to life, yes? It doesn't mean he's stronger/faster or some bullshit. It means Frankenstein managed to get a dead body to continue it's biological process...

Of course theres the Robert De Niro film where the monster is basically Batman.

 

[Padwolf]

It depends on what you define as the undead. To me, I believe him to be a different being entirely. He has thoughts, feelings, intelligence. He has a conscience. I guess you could put him under re-animated. I'm not entirely sure, to me it was him that seemed human and Frankenstein more the monster of the story. It's a great book, I'll have to dig out my copy and read it through again.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

The distinction is relatively easy to make the Monster, in this case, is simply alive. The qualification for "undead" is deceptively simple: something that would be recognized as dead using the best techniques available to science but is somehow still moving about of it's own accord. Frankenstein's Monster, in the course of the classic story, presents us with plenty of information to determine he is alive. For example, he has to eat and thus we know that he has a metabolism since this doesn't cause him to fill with rapidly rotting food products. He can move under his own power. Brain activity is directly shown because the monster demonstrably is able to observe and intelligently interact with the world around him. We can further assume that vital functions related to these things also work. Were a medical doctor to examine him, the conclusion wouldn't be that he is undead but rather that a mass of mismatched body parts is somehow, inexplicably, alive.

To use an example, a Vampire is generally considered undead because, were you to examine them clinically, it would be fair to assume you were looking at a corpse. The mythology gets a fair bit complex since there are so many versions of vampires these days but, in general, you wouldn't expect a vampire's heart to beat, they would have no need to breathe, and lacking anything resembling a metabolism, would approach room temperature. The only thing that contradicts the conclusion that they are dead is that they can move about and interact with the world. Thus where the word came from: they are clearly both dead and not dead simultaneously.

Basically, the difference comes down to a simple distinction: something that is undead inherently relies upon some process utterly unknown to any branch of science to allow motion and (possibly) thought independently of the biological structures of the body. Frankenstein's monster is a collection of biological structures of various bodies that are functioning together to produce a living being. To put it simply, were you to take a living person and swap their heart and a lung and their liver and their marrow and anything else that can be swapped out examples from other sources and then ambulated a few limbs and replaced them with the best prosthetic money and science can buy (you monster), you wouldn't consider the result to be undead. Unlucky perhaps but such a person would be the product of a miracle only slightly less impressive than the one responsible for Frankenstein's Monster.