Monsters and the Unknown

As I was reading Frankenstein, an interesting thought came to mind, and that of course is the thought of monstrosity. But more than monstrosity, it is the very notion of monstrosity and what makes it so. This specifically came to my mind after the events that happened yesterday with the bombing of Boston, which is obviously seen as a monstrous action that someone had committed. This begs to mind though, what is the very definition of monstrosity? We all talk about monsters in a very general sense, monsters hiding our beds, monsters with the sole purpose to scare us as if they have nothing better to do than waste their time making our lives miserable. Why? Because they're monsters. That's all that there is to it. But there's more than that, so much more than that. In our simplistic minds, we simply view monsters as these creatures or beings that exists only to torment, but surely something happened to them to make them so. There had to be some reason, some event, some anything that slowly changed them into the monsters that they are now. The term "monster" is so overused and undefined that it begs the notion of what a monster truly is. Just a simple search on Google presented this:

mon·ster  

/ˈmänstər/

Noun An imaginary creature that is typically large, ugly, and frightening.

Adjective Of an extraordinary and daunting size or extent.

Synonyms noun.   monstrosity adjective.   huge - enormous - monstrous - prodigious - tremendous

This can't stand to be true. Monsters truly take all shapes of forms and sizes. That's what makes it so terrifying. The monster itself could be dwelling inside the human mind, the pounding heart, the actions of a people or a being. There is one thing that monsters have shown us through Frankenstein however. The fact that the creation, Frankenstein's monster, had a mind. It had parts of humanity involved in its creation. That is the true monster, the emotions that rage out of control, the despair that became too much to handle, the fear that drives you to the end. The monster itself - it has the potential to rage through everyone because all monsters have a mind to be able to commit the things that it does. That's what makes a monster, not that it has emotions, but that it pays no attention to the control of emotions and lets go of everything that makes the person human.