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communities than their novel’s primary speakers (Cairney 25). Although this may seem like a
minor point, it is fairly unusual to pen a Swiss narrator when one is English, and even more
unusual to have an English narrator when one is Polish. As a Swiss, Shelley’s primary speaker,
Dr. Frankenstein, speaks German and French primarily, while her first language was English.
Similarly, Conrad’s speaker, Marlow, speaks English throughout his novel while Conrad was
raised speaking Polish. The chance that these unusual differences would accidentally spring up in
otherwise extremely similar texts is unlikely, especially when paired with the setting of both
texts.

Not only do both primary narrators speak a different first language than their respective
authors, but both stories take place in different locations than their author’s own country
(Cairney 22). While most authors prefer to write stories based on personal experiences in
familiar locations, Shelley and Conrad both chose to set their narratives outside their home
countries. Although Shelley was a native Englishwoman, she set Frankenstein primarily in the
Arctic Circle and Switzerland. Conrad followed suit, setting his narrative both outside the city of
London and in the heart of the Belgian Congo. Setting both stories in places uninhabited by the
authors emphasizes the intended universality of their messages and draws the reader in; like
Hamlet, set in the then-exotic Denmark, Shelley and Conrad piqued their readers’ interest by
intellectually taking them abroad without requiring them to budge from their personal libraries
(Cairney 22). These authorial similarities, however, are just the beginning of intertextuality on a
large adoptive scale between Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness, as their major structures and
themes show.

The basic plot structure of both stories is probably the most obvious similarity between
the two, as they follow the same basic formula: the framed narrative. As Cairney notes, this