Title: A Thousand Deaths

Author: Jack London

Date of First Publication: May 1899

Publisher: The Black Cat, vol. 4, no. 44 (Boston, MA)

Bibliographic Reference: isfdb

Type: Short story

Keywords: FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER; ANDROID; BYRONIC HERO; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER

Critical Summary: This early Jack London short story is narrated by a young man who, estranged from his wealthy parents, travels the world as a sailor. After he drowns in the San Francisco Bay, the narrator is improbably reunited with his cold-hearted scientist father when he is brought back to life by way of one of his father’s inventions, a resuscitating machine. Not recognizing that the resurrected sailor is his own son—and even once he does find this out, it does not move him at all—the scientist takes him to his remote island and forces him to assist in his experiments. The scientist repeatedly murders his son by various methods and then revives him to determine the extent and limits of his invention’s ability to raise the dead. To escape from his father after dying countless deaths, the narrator, having gained an experimental bent from his time on the island, devises a chemical weapon to vaporize his father and his father’s two black servants. The weapon succeeds, and the story abruptly ends with the narrator surrounded by the ashes of his captors.

The mad scientist on an island theme may have been taken from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, published three years earlier. However, there are also multiple resonances with the plot and themes of Frankenstein. The opening description of the narrator’s childhood in a rich family strongly resembles Dr. Frankenstein’s, yet in “A Thousand Deaths,” the privileged childhood ends in estrangement. Exile is forced on the narrator of “A Thousand Deaths” by his own family, while Dr. Frankenstein’s exile is self-imposed. Moreover, the benevolent Alphonse Frankenstein is replaced for the cruel, unfeeling scientist, who is also a type for Dr. Frankenstein. Like Dr. Frankenstein, the narrator’s scientist father is obsessed with creating (or recreating) life. Similarly, the narrator is both like Dr. Frankenstein in his role as narrator, and like Frankenstein’s Creature in his role as the scientist’s tortured subject. The narrator is to his father what the Creature was to Dr. Frankenstein, but the narrator is doubly his father’s creation in that he was conceived by him and then reanimated by him again and again. Like Frankenstein’s Creature, the narrator is a creation that slips out of the control of its creator, as he ultimately destroys his father for the sake of his own survival.

With only one female character—there is a brief description of the narrator’s mother, though she has no significance to the plot—A Thousand Deaths is male-centric and men are monstrous in their drives to create and destroy without any conscience. Not only is the scientist father incapable of any compassionate feelings for his son, but the son displays the same coldness when the story concludes, in a disturbing, matter-of-fact manner, with a carefully devised and coolly premeditated patricide.

Administrative Notes: Robert Brown, CSUF. Edited by Gareth O’Neal and Melanie Yogurtian, CSUF