That it is to stop a child's naming that impels the Creature almost accidentally to
kill him is significant in several ways. Most importantly, the Creature is existentially
unnamed, lacking an identity that denominates a particularized selfhood and a socialized
connectedness, the sort of implicit identity by which William himself immediately
commands authority. It was Victor Frankenstein's initial duty as his creator to accord
him that name but he fled from the responsibility. Thus, everywhere else in the novel,
with Victor from his distance actively participating in the process, the Creature
is identified, not by a name but through epithets, as being outside a human sphere.
In a symbolic sense at least, William dies for his naming, for taking on a function
only his brother has the right to perform.

Nineteenth-century travelers entering the valley of Chamonix.

The diction reminds us of the numerous uses of "ardent" and its derivatives (from
Latin ardere, 'to burn': see definitions) in Volume 1: see I:3:1 for instance, and
note. Out in the world rather than confined to a hovel, the Creature's capacity for
ardor carries dangerous implications.

Victor directly rejects the Creature's overture and vow not to be set in opposition.
To Victor, whose rejection of his Creature has hardened into a way of life, there
is no alternative to such opposition.

A curious, unusual vocative, but one indicating the Creature's continual association
with natural forces.

This is only the second occasion in which the Creature has shed tears, the other being
on the first night of his existence (II:3:2). Yet how different is this repetition,
another sign of the growing refinement of his emotional life. His oxymoronic response
to music (and perhaps to Safie as well) is a further example of how his education
proceeds by encompassing opposites (see II:3:6 and note).

Compare to II:3:7 and note.

As the preceding paragraphs have made clear, the more the Creature reads the more
he becomes conscious of alternate plot possibilities, of disparities between the worlds
conjured up by desire and the imagination and the inescapable reality of his condition.
Rather than find solace in his imaginative life, he experiences an increasing desperation.

This suggests a different kind of determinism from that continually evoked by Victor
Frankenstein, a social and economic form of destiny, what Marx was to denominate as
wage slavery.

Johnson's 1755 Dictionary offers us the appropriate definitions for this period, definitions
virtually lost to modern English usage:

To addict; to give up to ill.
To curse; to execrate; to doom to destruction.

For the second meaning Johnson helpfully cites the Satanic legions in Paradise Lost,
V.890.

The phrase "devoted head" is so common a usage as to appear to be a customary eighteenth-century
idiom.