1408

  • I tried to conceal Although Clerval has just been described as like a "former self" to Victor, the difference
    between them involves more than the effect of experience on each man's sense of well-being.
    Victor is, in effect, living a lie, and his lack of openness to Clerval is the actual
    wedge by which their division is being enforced.

    • 1407

  • concealing the true reasons

    Asked to reply candidly, Victor lies to his father. This might be considered of a
    piece with the way he recalled his solemn promise to the Creature two paragraphs earlier:
    no sooner was it invoked than he began immediately to consider what would result should
    he dare to break it.

    • 1405

  • trembling with passion We are returned to the language of "ardour" associated with Victor's earlier obsession
    with his scientific experiments and to his lack of self-control in their pursuit.
    What is new here is the sudden resort to unchecked and criminal violence.

    • 1404

  • trembled violently

    This is also the phrase used to depict Felix De Lacey upon his last appearance in
    the novel (II:8:11 and note).

    • 1403

  • To you first entering on life In regard to this curious reminder of the present tense in which Victor narrates
    the story of his life, it is important to recall that, far from being Victor's junior,
    Walton is 28 years old at this point in the account, one year older than Victor. A
    useful point of comparison is the exchange between the simple Chamois Hunter and Manfred
    in the second act of Byron's Manfred, the dramatic poem he began in the summer of
    1816 and set in the same Alpine wilderness as the second volume of Mary Shelley's
    Frankenstein.

    • 1402

  • the tour of Scotland alone Obviously, Victor needs to isolate himself in order to carry out his scientific labors.
    On the other hand, the phraseology here may be seen as indicative of an antisocial
    instinct that has been so long indulged as to have become an essential aspect of his
    character.

    • 1401

  • it did not endure the violence of the change without torture Having been created over a long period of time, then brought to life, the Creature
    has passed the nearly six years of his existence being recreated in an inverse, indeed,
    a negative manner. He describes it as viscerallly painful, a creation without anesthesia.
    The violent negation of his original being is a corollary to the way in which hatred
    replaced love as his bond with Victor Frankenstein.

    • 1400

  • tore to pieces the thing On the complex moral spectrum laid out by this novel Victor here engages in the equivalent
    of murder. His destructive burst of passion and pointed denial of humanity to the
    object of his creation, which he calls a thing, reduce him at least to the moral level
    of the Creature, who at this point has likewise been guilty of one murder.

    • 1399

  • You throw a torch Walton's metaphor is prescient, since it is by fire that the Creature plans to consume
    himself (III:Walton:45). It is no coincidence but an extensive of the metaphor that
    Victor appears to have succumbed to a consumptive fever (III:Walton:14).

    • 1389

  • which are to cease but with life Another conspicuous feature of the final chapter is introduced here. Although we
    are close to having completed the narrative circle, returning to Walton's voice part
    way through this chapter, the continual shift of time frames does more than remind
    us of this impending closure. The sudden confrontation of past and future in a sentence
    such as this also serves implicitly to suggest that at the point where Victor locked
    himself into the hermetically sealed enclosure of his obsession, time began to lose
    its normative distinctions.
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