1011
The state of Victor's conscience is borne out by the perturbed dreams that, as he
will report in the last paragraph of this chapter, continually afflict him in sleep.
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Victor is exonerated from reponsibility for any criminal activity. Thus, this "award"
is one that, in Victor's mind, exists beyond the checkered course of human justice.
In a fine irony, it is only moments before he narrates the events of a trial from
which he easily secures his release that Victor indicates to Walton that he has brought
himself to the bar to be condemned.
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as he represented himself three paragraphs earlier, seems far from certain. His shying
from contact with his fellow humans has become virtually instinctive. That he refers
to the fishermen by the generic term "creatures" is instructive, since it separates
them to a marked degree within the same generic category as the being whom he created.
1008
himself by deferral to a presumed destiny he cannot alter.
1007
19th, noting that Victor will begin his tale the following day. Thus, Victor's long
narrative, which constitutes the bulk of the novel's three volumes and spans many
years and all of Europe, has occupied a mere six days of the fictional time frame.
1006
"August" in the 1818 text. This was changed to "September" in 1831 to avoid a jumble
in the chronology (compare III:1 in both 1818 and 1831). The expedition to Mont Blanc
took place "about the middle of August" (II:1:10), but then upon Victor's return,
as this chapter opens by recounting, "Day after day, week after week passed away"
(III:1:1) in listlessness.
1005
to create a being of abnormal stature or to envision a succesion of horrific torments
he might suffer, is always larger than life. The remark does, however, prepare us
for the extraordinary distance he does, indeed, travel.
1004
explains these courts of trial as follows: The sessions held periodically in each
county of England, for the purpose of administering civil and criminal justice, by
judges acting under certain special commissions (chiefly and usually, but not exclusively,
being ordinary judges of the superior courts, or, after 1875, of the Supreme Court).
It was provided by Magna Carta that the judges should visit each county once every
year to take assizes (i.e. try writs of assize) of novel disseisin, mort d'ancestre,
and darreine presentment (so that the jury who constituted the Grand Assize . . .
might not be obliged to travel from remote corners of England to appear in court at
Westminster). Thence the names assizes, and justices or judges of assize, still retained
by these circuit courts and itinerant judges, after their judicial functions had been
greatly extended in various directions, especially in that of the trial of felonies
and offences. Assizes were abolished by the Courts Act, 1971; their criminal jurisdiction
was transferred to the Crown Courts. Of course, Ireland in the eighteenth-century
had not yet been joined administratively to the mechanisms of the United Kingdom as
it would become with the Act of Union of 1801. But in practical effect the nominally
independent country, in its administration of justice, modeled itself on the English
system.
1003
become so absolute that he never questions his aims or how they are thus assured.
Unlike Walton and his crew, he is locked into a vision as rigid and unmoving as had
been the icefield surrounding the ship. When it breaks apart, offering an escape to
a renewed, living community, Victor chooses to revert to the closed and solitary circle
of his vengeance. That decision insures, indeed, is virtually the equivalent of, the
death that forestalls his further pursuit of the Creature.
1002
might be seen as constituting something of a floodwater for what will become an increasingly
powerful, inescapable driving force in Victor's comprehension of the world. At the
conceptual core of this notion of destiny one finds combined, as here, a sense of
his own incapacity to act independently, a passivity before what he construes as superior
power, and an abnegation of responsibility for the actions of himself or others.