11-19-12

Dear outside world,

How many of you have seen the old black and white Frankenstein movie and/or have read the book? When I was young, I viewed Frankenstein as just a scary monster that would leave me with terrifying nightmares after watching it. But a lot of years later while sitting in a cold and lonely windowless prison cell, I read the book Frankenstein, and it allowed my imagination to really see the monster for the first time.

For ten (10) years I endured the desolation and isolation of being entombed in a windowless cell twenty-three (23) hours a day. The conditions were very dehumanizing, demoralizing, and inhumane. Every day Doctor Frankenstein went out of his way to display deliberate acts to antagonize, irritate, and flaunt his power over the monster. Doctor Frankenstein would victimize the monster with psychological cruelty, sexual abuse, and physical assaults. Doctor Frankenstein condemned, rejected, crucified and despised the monster he had created.

Now from reading the book, it became hard to figure out who the "real monster" was. Was it the monster himself, the man who created him, or were both of them monsters? Yes, I agree; it's a hard question to answer. So I asked this question... "Doctor Frankenstein, did you ever consider what the effects would be of placing me in a windowless cell twenty-three (23) hours a day, under extreme isolation, complete idleness, limited environmental stimulation, no education, and forced to endure psychological and physical cruelty from people who don't even know me?

The answer I came up with was, Doctor Frankenstein did not place the monster on the isolation unit to rehabilitate him. His aim was to destroy the monster he had created: to transform him from a human being to a prison being, and treat him like an outcast.

Then I had to ask the question, what responsibility did the monster have in all this?

Now Doctor Frankenstein created the monster with many different human parts, even though he did not teach the monster how to use them. But as the monster started to understand himself, he realized that he had a "free will" to choose his path in life.

In the movie and in the book, the monster killed a young child because he did not know his own strength. But the monster went on to kill a young lady who had rejected him, and the monster made a "conscious choice" to commit a crime, which at that point made him a monster.

I guess you can say they both choose to become what they were... monsters.

The moral of this writing is, "Man is free to choose, but never free from the responsibility of what he chooses".

Strong but human!
Christopher Trotter