This is not the first time that Victor has been thought "heartless": he levels the
charge at his own behavior after Clerval's arrival in Ingolstadt (I:4:13 and note).

This is the Creature's first sense of how he appears as a figure within a natural
order. It is not a pleasant discovery to find oneself a discordant presence, but,
as the ensuing paragraph relates, a kind of natural logic helps this eight-foot anomalous
being not to feel himself divorced from the natural order. On the contrary, he seems
instinctively able to recognize his affinity with it, even down to what he shares
with beings as tiny as sparrows.

The sense of the momentous responsibility he has assumed seems for the moment to have
made Victor into a new being. In a curious way, by recognizing what it is to be God,
he becomes more like the sober and fearful Adam setting out from Eden at the end of
Paradise Lost, a moral being for whom, as the Creature himself has acknowledged in
reference to Byron's Manfred (II:5:18 and note, II:7:10 and note), knowledge is commensurate
with sorrow.

The Creature has not yet learned the concept of fictionality: from his naive perspective
all narratives are alike dutiful representations of reality.

Although only mentioned here in passing, this is the novel's third unjust trial. All
its circumstances—from involvement of the elder De Lacey and Agatha, who had no part
in Felix's machinations, to the five-month pre-trial incarceration, to the confiscation
of the family fortune and their banishment—suggest an arbitrary and tyrannical abuse
of power by the state.

That is, the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, which is the horizontal glacial field fed
by three glaciers (including Montanvert) on the sides of Mont Blanc.

Compare Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," lines 104-14.

This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
war.

The Creature travels west for three full days. Given his stature and endurance, one
would assume this would allow him to cover a large tract of south-central Germany.

Only at this point, at the end of the chapter, do we become aware that the Creature
has, up to now, no ability to relate linguistically, that he is still operating on
the non-verbal level of the sparrows and thrushes whose sounds he first discriminated
(paragraph 4 above). Although presumably the De Lacey family speaks during the ongoing
business of the day, except for the "few sounds" (paragraph 14 above) that were uttered
by the young man outside the cottage and by the old man when his music elicited tears,
this account is, as it were, rendered against a backdrop of total silence except for
the interlude of music. Mary Shelley's artistic refinement in rendering this silence
intensifies, in contrast, the importance of words and of communication for the world
of her novel.