1254
concern of the benevolent Mr. Kirwin that he is as true a friend to him as his father.
concern of the benevolent Mr. Kirwin that he is as true a friend to him as his father.
1253
and the Creature, in turn, after the collapse of his aspirations with the DeLacey's
thinks of Victor in a like capacity (II:8:30). Throughout this last chapter, however,
Victor has conceptualized his Creature wholly in adversarial terms, again and again
referring to him as an enemy.
1252
this is the first indication that Victor is also growing into his physical counterpart.
Perhaps, these signs of death are to be read from a moral perspective, as indicating
how deeply implicated with spiritual decay is Victor's retreat from normal human interaction.
1251
affairs, social obligations, legal contracts, uses of knowledge—even, in Victor's
rationale for suspending his second creation, the human race. This occasion is different
from all the rest, involving the question of what is the moral duty of a human to
another sentient but alien being. This assertion of the priority of moral obligation
requires willed self-abnegation on Walton's part. No other figure in the novel, certainly
not Victor Frankenstein, has ever assumed that the Creature was owed anything.
1250
strong sense that he has built a conceptual prison around himself. If the purpose
of one's life is solely to bring death to another, then the notion of a vital or life
force has been systematically inverted. Such a psychological condition is clearly
pathological.
1249
subtly in play up to this moment between Victor's self-accusations and his actual
avowal of culpability. The man talking to his father knows that he is innocent of
the crime for which he is languishing in jail. The one speaking in Walton's cabin
nearly three years later, in contrast, has locked the key on his own imprisonment.
1248
much of a piece with other literary productions by the Geneva circle during the summer
of 1816, most particularly The Prisoner of Chillon, written by Lord Byron in the week
after he and Percy Bysshe Shelley visited the Castle of Chillon during their boat
trip around the lake in mid-July. Shelley included an account in the letters he appended
to A History of a Six Weeks' Tour. In Byron's poem, at the end of his long captivity,
François de Bonnivard, the prisoner, claims, "It was at length the same to me, / Fetter'd
or fetterless to be" (lines 372-73) and ruefully notes, in much the same language
as Victor employs here, that "iron is a cankering thing, / For in these limbs its
teeth remain, / With marks that will not wear away" (lines 38-40).
1247
during his fourth voyage to the north in 1611 resulted in the renowned explorer's
death. Even so late as his polar exploration of 1829, Sir John Ross experienced a
mutiny on one of its ships.
1246
to whom Victor originally gave "life and spirit" was so horribly mutilated in his
creation as to provoke universal aversion from all whom he met. Now, in the text,
Victor hopes in some way to rectify that lack of initial perspective and clean up
either what he once called his "filthy creation" (I:3:9), or lacking success at that
aim, at least his own image. The secondary irony is that neither he nor his Creature
can expect an individual "posterity" since each has denied the other the possibility
of procreation. The posterity that will determine their lasting reputations is thus
composed solely of readers of the present text that Victor is so assiduously determined
to rewrite.
1245
as a physiologist. What the reader cannot miss, however, is the extent of self-absorption
that could lead a man in the process of discovering his wife's corpse to note his
own bodily symptoms with such detached scrupulosity.