we will never read this novel. Thus, even as Walton is apprehensive about his future,
we know that he will survive. This is something more, however, than a conventional
expression of fear or a plea for pity, being rather another instance of Mary Shelley's
accentuating the instability of her text and the innumerable contingencies surrounding
all authorship, whether we think of the result as her novel or Victor's Creature.