Frankenstein Chapter 11 Summary: The Creature's First Days. Learning to Exist

The creature cannot clearly remember his first hours. Light, sound, smell, and touch arrive together. He finds himself in the forest near Ingolstadt, drinks from a brook, eats berries, and weeps when night and cold come at once. A cloak under a tree, the moon, and the songs of birds become his first distinct pleasures. He learns, by burning his hand, that the fire left by beggars both comforts and wounds, and he learns to dry wet wood so the flame will last.

When food fails he leaves the fire he cannot remake and walks three days into snow. An old shepherd shrieks and runs from a hut. The creature eats the abandoned breakfast and later enters a village. Children scream. A woman faints. Stones drive him into a low hovel built against a neat cottage. He calls it shelter from the weather and, still more, from the barbarity of man.

Through a filled-up window he watches a household. A girl with a pail, meanly dressed and sad, meets a young man who takes the burden from her head. An old man with silver hair plays an instrument until she kneels, weeping, and is raised with a smile. The creature feels a mixture of pain and pleasure he has never had from food or cold, and he has to look away. At night they prolong the light with tapers. The youth utters sounds that are not music. The creature does not yet know these are words. The family put out the lights and, as he guesses, go to rest.