The False Identities of Frankenstein and His Monster
Forgoing the traditional hero-villain dichotomy, the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and his monster can be read as symmetric—each a tragic victim of essentially similar circumstances—and as analogous to the relationship between Captain Walton and Victor, such that on the level of plot, the very existence of the monster, as well as that of Victor, may be called into question.  This subtext relies upon evidence from throughout the plot, but is most directly approached within the narrative segment aboard Captain Walton's ship in Part III, Chapter VII, in one of Walton’s letters to his sister (dated 26 August), in which Walton praises Victor’s character and laments his imminent death and the attendant loss of companionship facing Walton (232-234).
The parallels between the short life of Victor Frankenstein and the even briefer life and killing career of the monster can be drawn perhaps most compellingly in the formations of their respective worldviews.  Victor—whom Captain Walton is to later describe as “on every point of general literature … display[ing] unbounded knowledge, and a quick and piercing apprehension” (232)—is presented as naturally curious, an autodidact unfortunately equipped only with the out-of-date works of alchemists and mystics, before his entry into the university at Ingolstadt and his meteoric rise as a scientist in the academic community there.  This prefigures the efforts of the monster to educate himself, at first acquiring language by secretly observing the cottagers, then reading what few written works he has scavenged: Volney’s The Ruins, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werter, Plutarch’s Lives, and most prominently echoed in the narrative, Milton’s Paradise Lost.  The monster’s naïve notions of the basic goodness of humankind are painfully shattered when he fails in his calculated attempt to introduce himself to the cottagers; it is not long before the monster is driven to murder.  For both Victor and the monster, albeit to diametrically disparate awakenings, the purity and elegance of theory are no match for the reality they must confront in social contexts, be they of the academic disciplines or of the simple face-to-face interaction with villagers.
Apart from their intellectual backgrounds, there is a connection in Victor and the monster’s respective love interests.  Victor is enamored since his youth with none other than his cousin Elizabeth, whose death is arguably the most pointedly foreshadowed (by the monster’s promise to Victor that “I shall be with you on your wedding-night” (193)) and most spiritually crushing to Victor.  Consider that if Victor had completed as promised his creation of a female partner for the monster—Victor’s first “brain-child”—the bride would be something like the monster’s sister.  The incestuous implications and the allusions to the myth of the Garden of Eden are eclipsed in importance by the psychological weight of lifelong familiarity.  As Victor intimates to Captain Walton, in rebuke of Walton’s attempts to “reconcile him to life” (233): “‘… the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds, which hardly any later friend can obtain.  They know our infantine dispositions…’” (233)  Thus is the anguish of Victor, again like that of his monster, revealed to be rooted in loneliness seeking the intimacy of a mind not only very much like but in fact hereditarily related to itself.
What is to be made of these similarities between Victor Frankenstein and his loathed creation?  Certainly, the development of nuanced motives of like origin for the two mortal enemies adds ironic depth to the narrative.  But by extrapolating the relationship into an encrypted feature of the plot, it may be interpreted that the monster does not in fact exist in its own right, but is merely a projection by a Victor who is mentally unstable in the wake of his mother’s untimely death.  (Victor’s susceptibility to delusional states of mind is established by Captain Walton: “[H]e enjoys one comfort, the offspring of solitude and delirium: he believes, that, when in dreams he holds converse with his friends… they are not the creations of his fancy, but the real beings who visit him from the regions of a remote world” (232).)  This would explain the monster’s access to Victor’s loved ones—it is a more satisfying explanation, at any rate, than the monster’s assertion that he had run into William by sheer chance (167)—and the way that the monster seems to follow Victor over land and sea with no trouble.  The removal of the monster as a medium of responsibility between Victor and the deaths of William and later victims resolves Victor’s baseless intuition of the killer’s identity—“[t]he mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact” (103).
Consider also the likeness in setting for the meetings of the characters: Victor’s first, dialogue-driven encounter with his monster is upon a “glacier” (124), “a scene terrifically desolate” (123), whereas Captain Walton writes to his sister “encompassed by peril… surrounded by mountains of ice” (234), within a month after finding Victor during an ice break (57).  Is it possible that Victor himself is a symbolic hallucination by a delirious Captain Walton?  This would cast Victor’s hypocritical address to Walton’s mutinous crew (236) in a slightly different light: whereas Walton had at first thought that it is by Victor’s eloquence that “[his] men were moved.  They looked at one another, and were unable to reply” (237), before he cedes to their cowardice and agrees to return to England, we can assume that Walton’s men, seeing that he is raving mad, and of course unimpressed by any speech “delivered”  by the nonexistent Victor, simply choose to withdraw in general bewilderment.
This admittedly modernistic twist does not detract from the theme of the peril of scientific discovery, for it is still the ill-advised attempted journey to the North Pole that has brought about this state of affairs.  Indeed, it serves to