Concerning the seeds of creativity that produced her Frankenstein, Mary Shelley paraphrases Sancho Panza, explaining that "everything must have a beginning". She and Percy Shelley had read Don Quixote, as well as German horror novels, during the "wet and unpleasant summer" and "incessant rain" of their stay with Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Geneva in 1816. In his introduction, Maurice Hindle note the connection between the two fictional madmen: both Don Quixote and Frankenstein begin with the noble intention of helping their fellow man, but their aspirations are doomed by the pursuit of a "single vision". one that takes them ever further away from meeting the moderate needs of the community, and ever closer to a tragic personal denouement. (Frankenstein xxxviii) Society, too, must have had its beginning, but theorists from Hume to Marx to Darwin and writers like Shelley and Dostoevsky may never resolve the question of who or what came first: the individual or the community? One thing seems clear: Whether through sensational impressions, inductive reasoning, or common sense, the individual cannot long survive without meaningful inclusion within the larger group of humanity. From childhood, we recognize the profound pain that comes from exclusion from the majority, and this alienation, in Marxian parlance, can lead to an antagonistic stance towards society, as dramatized in both Frankenstein's “monster” and The Underground Man by Dostoevsky. The monster proclaims in his agony that he is "evil because I am unhappy," and he is unhappy, no doubt, because he is not only alone but shunned by society (147). Shelly's creation is partly deri... half of paper......arles. “The origin of species”. From Modernism to Postmodernism: AnAnthology. Second expanded edition. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishing.2003.Dostoevsky, Fyodor. “Notes from the underground”. The Norton Anthology of WorldMasterpieces: The Western Tradition 7th Edition Vol. 2. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New York, New York. 1999.Hume, David. “A treatise on human nature”. From Modernism to Postmodernism: AnAnthology. Second expanded edition. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishing.2003.Marx, Karl. Communist Party Manifesto: “Bourgeois and proletarians”. From Modernism to Postmodernism: an anthology. Second expanded edition. Ed.Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishing. 2003.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle.Penguin Books. United Kingdom, 2003.http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx