This is an artistically crafted interval during which Mary Shelley deftly brings Victor
back to the center of her novel as a moral being.

The Creature, cursing both his own creation and his Creator, tellingly echoes Victor's
own imprecation on himself uttered several hours earlier (see II:2:14 and note).

The last plot line of the novel, that involving the Arabian Safie, is introduced at
this significant point of the narrative, the central chapter of the work as published
in 1818.

Unknowingly yet shrewdly, throughout this speech the Creature touches Victor Frankenstein
on his most sensitive moral points. Watching Justine condemned for a crime for which
he held himself responsible, Victor was (and continues to be) racked by a sense of
injustice. Yet, in condemning the Creature, he is just as guilty of fundamental injustice
as had been the Genevan magistracy.

Although on the face of it this appears like stealing, the Creature makes no distinction
between this human fare and the other bounty of the earth on which he has been living.
His unconscious socialism is surely a deliberate ploy of Mary Shelley's, reflecting
a general family political viewpoint.

Obviously, Safie is also a part of the Turk's property and is expected to be part
of the final shipment of his goods home. Four paragraphs earlier, we recall, the De
Laceys have had their entire fortune confiscated by the state for abetting the Turk's
escape.

It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.

Although De Lacey's blindness allows the Creature unmediated access to him, another
reason he approaches the elder man is his instinctive veneration for those older than
he, a transference from the respect he would have accorded Victor Frankenstein.

The Creature's inherent generosity earns him this appellation, which is an ironic
reversal of that used by Victor Frankenstein to describe himself in the introductory
paragraph of Volume 2. There he conceives himself as wandering like "an evil spirit"
(II:1:1).

This seems another connection with legendary associations of Prometheus. In Percy
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia, the Titan's consort, credits him with responsibity
for our access to language: "He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which
is the measure of the universe" (II.iv.72-73).