The powerful wrench to the language here replicates the effect of Victor's awaking
from his dreams into a new and alien perspective on his obsession. There is a faint
resonance of the "disaster" that Margaret Saville is recorded in the novel's first
sentence (I:L1:1) as foreseeing for Walton's expedition. The stark word would have
borne another kind of resonance in Mary Shelley's culture: Buffon'sNatural History
gave wide currency to a catastrophic theory of creation, and Victor's adolescent delight
in that account (at least as it is recounted in the first edition of the novel—see
I:1:25) would thus seem to have left an indelible, ironic imprint on him.