At the end of Frankenstein, the Creature finds Victor dead aboard Walton's ship, vows to burn himself on a funeral pyre and leaves across the ice. Walton last sees him carried off by the waves into the dark. The novel never shows the Creature die.
Every quotation below comes from the 1818 text. The story closes inside the letters Walton writes to his sister Margaret, and the passages run from Letter IV to the last page of Volume III.
Where does Walton first see the Creature?
On the ice, from his ship, before he knows what he is looking at. In Letter IV he reports a sledge crossing the distance:
We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile: a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge, and guided the dogs.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Letter IV (1818)
Walton sees a man's outline at an unnatural size, half a mile away. The reader first meets the Creature in this figure on the ice, and the last page returns to it.
How does Victor end up aboard Walton's ship?
Walton rescues him from the ice, and Victor says so himself. He speaks in the same Letter IV:
And yet you rescued me from a strange and perilous situation; you have benevolently restored me to life.
Letter IV (1818)
Victor needs only a few words for his own state, "strange and perilous." Walton's letters then carry Victor's account of how he came to be there, and that account is the novel.
What are Victor's last words to Walton?
He tells Walton to seek happiness in tranquillity and to avoid ambition. Near the end of Volume III, Walton writes down what Victor says:
Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.
Volume III (1818), Walton's last letters
Victor doubts his advice within a sentence. He asks himself why he is saying it, then admits that another man may still succeed where he was blasted. The warning and the doubt arrive together.
How does Victor die?
Quietly, with his hand in Walton's. Walton records it in one sentence:
he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed for ever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.
Volume III (1818)
A gentle smile is the last thing Walton sees on his face. After three volumes of ambition, the novel ends Victor's life with a hand pressed feebly and a smile fading.
Where does the Creature appear in the cabin?
Over Victor's coffin. Walton finds there a form he says he cannot find words to describe:
Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe; gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy.
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
Walton stands closer to him here than anywhere else in the book, and still cannot see his face. Our piece on what the Creature looks like in the book gathers the other physical descriptions.
The Creature then speaks over the body:
"That is also my victim!" he exclaimed; "in his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close!"
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
He counts Victor among his victims and calls his own life a series wound to its close. The creator is dead, and the creation says his story ends with him.
What does the Creature say he will do after Victor's death?
He says he will leave the ship, go to the northern extremity of the globe and burn his own body. He tells Walton directly:
I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been.
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
The pyre has a purpose. He wants nobody to study his remains and repeat what Victor did, so the fire guards against a second creature like him. Lines later he asks the question that explains the rest:
Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
Does the Creature expect to suffer when he burns?
He expects the fire to hurt and welcomes it. Walton reports that he speaks "with sad and solemn enthusiasm":
"But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell."
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
"Or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus" is the most open line in the speech. He claims no knowledge of what follows death. He says only that it will not feel as he feels now.
How does the Creature leave the ship?
He jumps from the cabin window onto an ice-raft beside the vessel and is carried off. These are the last lines of the novel, followed only by "THE END":
He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.
Volume III, Chapter VII (1818)
Walton gives him one sentence of motion and one of loss. After "lost in darkness and distance" the book says nothing more about him.
Who tells the ending?
Walton does, and that choice matters. The novel opens with his letters and returns to them for its last pages, so the final view of the Creature comes from a stranger who met Victor only at the end. Victor never watches him leave.
The ending comes to us as one man's report to his sister. Walton reports what he saw and heard in the cabin, and he cannot say what happened once the raft vanished into the dark.
Does the novel show the Creature's death?
No. The pages above hold his promise, his farewell and the image of the raft disappearing. Nothing in them confirms that the pyre is ever lit, Walton does not follow him, and no narrator reports an end.
Readers fill the silence differently. Some take the vow as the death, others keep him alive on the ice. The text supports the vow and the departure, and it stops there.
What did the Creature ask for earlier in the book?
He asked to be made happy. On the glacier in Volume II, Chapter II, he tells Victor:
Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.
Volume II, Chapter II (1818)
The sentence reads differently once you know where the story ends. The being who asked for happiness ends by promising himself to the fire. Our essay on the Creature as a tragic hero follows that arc in full.
What does this ending have to do with the Studio Everart statue?
It gives the Creature his second head. The Studio Everart Frankenstein statue comes with two interchangeable heads for him. One shows an indifferent body. The other shows a poor existence condemned to suffering, the figure who speaks on the ice.
The piece is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Creators Edition, Chapter II of the Masters of Madness series: a 32 cm statue in hand-painted polystone, a composite of resin and stone powder, limited to 100 numbered pieces. It shows the Creature and Mary Shelley together, with his enormous bulk set against her.
