"Wretch" is the first term Victor applies to his Creature (I:4:3), as well as his
appellation for him at his reappearance in this chapter. It is apt that the creature
thus picks up this resonant word and by shifting its form alters its meaning. For
her debut as a novelist Mary Shelley adopts a daring and difficult but brilliantly
successful strategy, keeping the Creature out of sight for most of Volume I while
Victor heaps terms of abuse on his felt presence and renders him for the reader the
monster he is wont to call him. The urbane calm of the Creature's opening statement,
"I expected this reception," is a startling reminder of just how much Victor, in his
narration of his story, has skewed the perspective on its events. In effect, the Creature
takes the opportunity of his finally being heard to rename, to reconceptualize, himself.
And the reader is left hanging in doubt—perhaps, even distrust—about rendering a verdict
from having listened only to one side of the case.

That the Creature has as yet no notion of how words that define feelings can be applied
suggests that the next stage of his education must be metaphysical, involving an understanding
of the self and an exploration of self-consciousness. For him this will necessarily
entail what Byron called "Consciousness awaking to her woes" (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
1.941: st. 92).

The repetition of "boundless" language from the previous chapter (see II:1:6 and note)
emphasizes the point that Victor is, as ever, too "ardent," unable to moderate or
even control his reaction. Whereas some earlier critics wished to enforce a facile
dichotomy between Victor as rationalist and his Creature as the exemplar of sensibility,
a passage like this reminds us of how little power Victor's capacity for abstraction
actually has over the broad field of his mind.

The Creature, as his narrative unfolds, will likewise represent himself through similar
language as he experiences what he conceives to be a betrayal by his "adopted" family,
the De Laceys. At that moment (II:8:12) in his recital he seems unconscious of the
close similarity between the two of them.

American usage would substitute the word "switchbacks" for this locution today.

A lengthy pattern of self-analysis and attendant self-alienation is implicit in this
passage. The Creature's divorce from himself is linked to the imagery of doubling
throughout the novel.

Elizabeth's comparative innocence does not allow her the larger perspective held by
the reader, who might want to apply the force of these words to the accruing series
of contrasts between herself and Victor being offered by this paragraph. In his lack
of candor, justice, and sympathy, Victor appears specifically to negate the virtues
of Elizabeth, who stands here as something of an emblem for truth itself.

These might be said to be the root questions of all philosophy. They are in a substantial
way the end toward which the progressive education of the Creature has been tending.
That they are unanswerable has larger implications than for just him. They contribute
to the exploratory tonalities of a novel that resists easy answers and unambiguous
truths.

Elizabeth's faith that a retreat from the world would allow the two of them a relief
from the buffeting of experience is understandable, if sadly ill-placed. The ensuing
chapters seem deliberately designed to test this hope both in their exemplary tale
of a collective retreat (involving not just the DeLacey's and Safie, but the Creature
as well) and in the very fact that, themselves taking place in an almost inaccessible
retreat, they present Victor Frankenstein with a moral crisis of a kind he has never
known and is unprepared for.

That the Creature proposes to make a virtue out of necessity and embrace his alienation
as a mode of existence indicates what two years of experience have cost him. The pathos
of this declaration does not call attention to itself, but is all the more affecting.

The Creature turns from Goethe's novel of isolated sensibility, where he sees his
own reflection (and we to some extent see Victor's) to contemplate the public and
civic models of Plutarch's biographical accounts, engaging a world of social interaction
and nation-building of which he has no experience whatsoever. Thus the accounts draw
him forth from his own isolation to imagine a larger cultural sphere of action in
which he might participate.