Writing, Journaling, and Messaging Theme Analysis

Dracula isn't really a "novel" at all; it does not present itself as the work of a single author or narrator. Instead, Dracula consists of series of diary entries, letters, telegrams, memoranda, and occasional newspaper clippings, assembled and typed up by Mina Harker, with help from Seward, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris, and Arthur, Lord Godalming. In a sense, then, Mina is the "author" of the book: she knits together these various accounts. This creates an intriguing "meta-narrative" effect: the characters in the novel are reading "the novel" as we, the reader, are making our way through it.

The novel is, essentially, a detective story, as the group finds out the nature of Dracula's violent activities and attempts to track him down and destroy him. The accounts knit together by Mina show how the group goes about catching the Count. Jonathan Harker's journal tells of his arrival to Transylvania, location of Castle Dracula; his eventual imprisonment there; his attempts to ward off Dracula and the Three Sisters; and his eventual escape to Budapest. Letters between Lucy and Mina track, primarily, the slow "illness" overtaking Lucy, which results in her becoming a vampire. Seward's diary contains information about the patient Renfield, an accomplice and acolyte of Dracula's, who refers to him as "lord and master." Mina's journal details Mina's own illness and refers to her hypnotic visions, which serve as a "conscious link" between the Count and Mina. Van Helsing notes down several events toward the end of the novel, including the final pursuit of Dracula; newspaper reports of supernatural events fill out the uncanniness of the narrative, from perspectives beyond those of Mina and the rest of the group.

These accounts serve a central purpose in Dracula. Journals, diaries, and other first-person accounts lend credence to events that, if they were narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, might seem too fantastical for the reader to accept. When the novel's characters make sense of the events they have seen, and relay these events to others, via their own writing and messaging, though, it puts the characters and the readers in the same position. Van Helsing therefore comments, in a quotation referenced by Harker in the novel's Closing Note, that because these are all "accounts" and not "objectively validated" by other persons, one still must, at the end of Dracula, take the characters' word for what has happened. Despite this almost obsessive reliance on the truthfulness of the information being reported, what we have, here, is nevertheless subject to embellishment and fantasy. It is up to the reader to judge if and when such fantasy has been inserted into the narrative.