1047

his countenance . . . treachery A reader cannot miss how without basis is this "reading" of the Creature's facial
expression. Victor has neither seen nor spoken to him for an entire year since their
encounter on the Sea of Ice. Moreover, throughout the progress of the second volume,
in the humanization attendant upon the Creature's autobiographical account, we had
gradually lost sight of his objective physical deformity. Here, we are thrust back
into an "objectification" that is so extreme that it allows Victor to relinguish all
sense of humane obligation or fellow feeling. The self-righteousness that accompanies
this distancing is perhaps to be expected.

1046

corrected and augmented The question of narrative truth is here given a sudden new twist. As readers over
the course of nearly three volumes containing Victor's narrative, we have come to
assume that it is a straight-forward account, unmediated by another voice. Now we
are forced to recognize that what we have read in this simple understanding has been
twice edited, first by Victor, and then by Walton acting at Victor's behest. What
Walton first wrote has in its second draft not only been "corrected," but "augmented,"
added to, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that mistakes could still survive
in the text, or that they could have been accidentally or—much more worrisome—deliberately
introduced in the process of editing, or that further areas for augmentation might
still exist that, if properly elaborated, might materially change the focus of our
perspective. In other words, Mary Shelley, having just merged two distinct narrative
voices and their respective audiences, now further destabilizes her text as an embodiment
of a fixed, immutably true account of its personalities and events. Our knowledge
is indeterminate and relative, wholly dependent on those voices that filter it.

1045

in continuation At this moment of Victor's desparate exhaustion and extreme isolation, Mary Shelley
tellingly reasserts the centrality of human continuity and connectedness. Her sudden
reassignment of the role of narrator, from Victor to Walton, also alters its assumed
audience. A ship's captain listening to the solitary voice of a dying refugee in the
Arctic wilderness shares in that sense of impacted solitude. In contrast, the vicarious
experience of Walton's sister, who is addressed directly in the next sentence and
who presumably will read this transmitted account in London, takes place at the heart
of human civilization. This inserted tag may have a second function as well, that
of reinforcing the question posed in the last paragraph of Victor's narrative, whether
Walton will honor his plea and continue Victor's obsessive pursuit of the Creature.

1044

the voice of conscience Walton reveals just how much he has learned from listening to Victor's narration,
which is to say, how much we have likewise learned from reading the novel. Confronting
the Creature with a stern morality but also with compassion, Walton attributes fundamental
human characteristics to him, insisting on his humanity and thus on his obligations
as a human being. The Creature responds in kind, enumerating even more complexly shaded
human attributes as fundamental to his constitution. This process of dynamic self-examination
through human interchange may also be seen as a new element in his experience, eliciting
a sense of self not as an alienated, and therefore unique and unaccountable, being,
but as a sharer in emotions and social duties common to the human race.

1043

I concealed . . . father Increasingly, in this volume, Alphonse Frankenstein seems incapable of living with
the actual state of the world beyond his enclosed family circle—and in this case,
he seems even unable to discern what is going on within it.

1042

many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave These deaths once more testify to the contingent and threatened nature of human life
in Frankenstein. The fact of such mortality is surely what exacerbates the crew's
sense of its peril and justifies its appeal to the captain to cut short his expedition.
Although Walton expresses no guilt for the fate of these mariners under his command,
one might wonder at its lack. Certainly, it is an odd paradox that the novel can concentrate
with such intensity on the murderous consequences of the antagonism of Victor Frankenstein
and his Creature but pass by without comment the revelation that Walton's enterprise
in pursuit of knowledge has resulted in apparently greater death than has their destructive
dynamic.

1041

composing draught Literally, a drink to quiet one. "Composing draught" is the common term used in the
eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries for a sedative or sleeping potion.

1040

the tenderest compassion In the see-saw effect of her characterization of Victor, Mary Shelley returns to
the side of his character that Walton finds most attractive. In an existential void
himself, one created as much by his own chosen withdrawal from social obligations
as by the pressure of catastrophic events, Victor is still able to sympathize with
the plight of Walton and his crew and to offer encouragement to their hopes. Perhaps
what would most easily explain this sympathetic posture, though it would not justify
the optimism he expresses to them, is Victor's own deep sense of helplessness before
an implacable force.

1039

commanded his countenance The connotations of this verb, along with the panoply of described emotions surrounding
it, forcefully indicate Victor's awareness of the effect he has had on his audience
over the previous six days. Walton's language, however, coming immediately upon his
assuming what purports to be a narrative objectivity, seems intended to have an even
more pronounced effect on the larger audience of Mary Shelley's novel. Where Walton
may feel he is experiencing an authentic emotionality, we in our greater detachment
may wish instead to discern in Victor's recounted autobiography an accomplished actor's
knowing manipulation of his subject matter and his audience.

1038

Come on, my enemy; we have yet to wrestle for our lives Indicative either of Victor's own deliberate reinterpretation of the Creature as
his double in rewording the "inscriptions" left for him, or of the symbiotic way in
which the Creature through the experience of revenge now sounds like a second self
of Victor's, this phrase recalls the masculinist bravado Victor twice indulges in
his impotent rage before the power of the Creature (see II:2:6 and III:3:16).

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