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Many of the books I love have in common one thing: at the end, everbody dies. So, accordingly, Frankenstein has moved onto my favorites list.

But more importantly and more interestingly, Frankenstein's structure, like an onion (or a parfait, hehe), allows for the outermost layer of the story, the true narrator, to be the survivor. As with much literature, the single survivor is perhaps the most integral part of a narrative, because he or she is the one that tells us the story.

I guess these characters serve as "insertion points" for the reader, by which we can fill the story with our own life experiences and thereby make sense of them. Pardon the Freudness in my following analogy: can we think of such characters as vaginas? By way of them, we enter the story and "impregnate" it with meaning, and a bit later, out pops an interpretation. Margaret, as well as Ishmael, Horatio, and Mr. Square, etc.-- all of them are like vaginas.

I'm not quite sure how people are going to read that analogy. I don't quite subscribe to it completely myself, and I'm even a little araid of it, but I thought it was interesting!