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either speaker at all requires the readers suspend to their disbelief, and again, this accomplishes
the same purposes in both texts. Though neither narrator appears particularly unreliable, they
both have unbelievable stories. By packaging their novels in first-person narration and insisting
that the story is true within the confines of their fictitious existences, the authors present their
final conclusions as the results of these ostensibly realistic events. Maintaining the possibility of
untruth on the first-person speakers’ parts, however, the authors give their readers room to
disbelieve these accounts’ factual accuracy while still accepting Shelley’s and Conrad’s basic
tenets of literary truth: By the time readers think through all the possibilities of Marlow and
Frankenstein lying, they are so likely to agree with the authors’ opinions that they do not care if
the framed is truthful to the frame.

Conrad mimics Shelley in a deeper, less defined way by matching his lead characters on
an almost one-to-one ratio with hers (Cairney 34). A simple example of this is Conrad’s narrator,
Marlow. Not only does he fulfil the same practical purpose that Walton does in Shelley’s
narrative, but he embodies the same likelihood to make the progressive mistakes that Walton
nearly commits (Shelley 259). In Frankenstein, Walton represents the Western world as it
careens towards imminent destruction in its thirst for knowledge; in Heart of Darkness, Marlow
represents the common Englishman witnessing the horrors of his culture’s expansion, learning to
avoid its evil—just like Walton before him. Things are a bit stickier with Kurtz, as his duality of
character allows him to embody both Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster (Cairney 40).
Whereas in Shelley’s story, the two were separate parts of the same basic being, Conrad shows
them in the same body—the creator and the creature—in a Jekyll and Hyde twist (Cairney 25).
However, his message remains the same; this minor difference shows his condensation of
characters rather than a real shift in meaning. The final main character Conrad copies and pastes