The first-person narration of “The Collector” by John Fowles and “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley is one of the features that make these stories so outstanding. It is about having a chance of looking into the brains of the protagonists, and trying to see the complete picture of what happened.
Both stories are not traditional in the manner of the text construction. Both Fowles and Shelley use uncommon schemes: he, using both protagonists to tell the story from their perspective, one after another, as if summing it all up, and she, using a story-within-a-story (sort of “wrapped” into it).
The “Collector” reveals the characters of two main characters, who tell the same story in a row, so that the reader could see what really happened, and was they felt about it. Frederick (though he preferred to be called Ferdinand, but was called Caliban anyway) Clegg’s part of the kidnapping and the life of Miranda in the sellar of his detached house is quite sketchy, if the reader reads the whole story. He is the one to explain all the initial causes and intentions, he is the only one to reveal his own way of thinking and feeling. Miranda’s point of view rarely coincides with what he thinks, but that’s what makes the picture more complete. Both of them are homodiegetic narrators, for they are not only telling the story, they are a part of it, the main part.
