Victor's account of himself in these paragraphs testifies to a person on the brink
of becoming unhinged—almost paralyzed, needing two days at Lausanne to recover a sense
of purpose, invoking his native landscape in effusive tears. Such immature behavior
could be a sign of the fears he has repressed for a year and a half, and certainly
for the reader their emotional heightening portends some new disaster about to reveal
itself. At the same time, if we wish to assume that this is a novel with pretensions
to being realistic, and not merely gothic in its representation, we might wish here
to turn our attention from the ominous to the psychological. These are all symptoms
of a personality that has barely survived its breakdown. The year of convalesence
has offered tranquillity, but does not appear to have altered the essential trauma
Victor has suffered in the Creature's birth. Throughout the rest of the novel, Mary
Shelley adroitly poises her protagonist on the edge of madness, and the readers of
his behavior (a class that should include Walton as well as us) can never be quite
sure on what side of the line he stands.