NOTES

The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around

As the chapter continues the tentative "seems" of the shadow cast by the dead is sharpened by Victor into a certainty. The dead become the enablers of his action and he sees himself increasingly as acting upon their behalf. Again, Mary Shelley's psychological portrait here is subtly telling: a person who has given up all sense of individual will has surrendered the central principal of vitality and may, indeed, be considered to have become an agent of death.