1207

  • lost in darkness and distance The novel closes with a fine symmetry, repeating the verbal form ("lost") with which
    the Creature had disappeared from view in Volume 1 (I:L4:3) and Volume 2 (II:9:18).
    Given its profound association with the epic of Milton that so haunts this work, that
    term may be thought to be a marker for the Creature's entire existence.

    • 1206

  • I passed whole days . . . silent and listless

    Victor has returned to the desultory sailing on Lake Geneva that occupied him earlier
    in the summer (II:1:5 and note). To be "listless" is literally to be without desire.

    • 1205

  • listless indolence

    The near-catatonic state in which Victor exists is a sign of profound mental disturbance:
    Mary Shelley's repetition of the word "listless" from the chapter's beginning indicates
    that Victor leaves in the same state in which he has existed since his interview with
    the Creature: compare III:1:1 and note.

    • 1204

  • Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away In contemplating his end, the Creature logically reverts to the memory of his first
    sensations as he became conscious of the world around him (II:3:1 and note).

    • 1203

  • until my own life, or that of my adversary, were extinguished Mary Shelley here offers another accentuation of the adversarial masculinist code
    that has dominated Victor's perspective on his Creature and blinded him to the dangers
    to which he has exposed his loved ones. The melodramatic posturing, it should be emphasized,
    does have a purpose if we remind ourselves that this first-person narrative is delivered
    to a listener, Robert Walton, who at the end of the next chapter will reenter the
    novel. Since Victor is well aware that Walton is preserving this record as an exemplary
    warning to later human generations, he has every reason to try to influence the portrait
    thus handed down to the future.

    • 1202

  • liberty had been a useless gift In Mary Shelley's households, whether living with her husband or her father, liberty
    is the greatest of human gifts. For Victor to call it useless speaks volumes about
    the deterioration of his mind and sensibility. It also subtly links his present mental
    condition to his continuing sloughing off of personal responsibility upon an abstract
    and transcendental destiny.

    • 1201

  • the letters of Felix and Safie These were the letters Safie wrote Felix imploring his aid in the rescue of her father
    from prison and that she had translated from Turkish into French. In recounting this
    episode, the Creature had promised to give Victor the copies he had made of them (II:6:7),
    and this offhand reference suggests that he did so. The logical completion of that
    strand of the narrative does not, of course, explain just why Victor Frankenstein,
    embarked on an odyssey of epic proportions where he can scarcely provide himself with
    the essentials of life, is carrying the translated correspondence of a perfect stranger.

    • 1200

  • the lessons of my father Victor is at this point twenty-five years old and seemingly beyond the necessity
    of instruction in the nature of human affairs. The distance, in attitude and experience,
    between father and son stands without comment, although Victor's silence at the beginning
    of this scene of patriarchal instruction is indicative of how unbridgeable we may
    presume has become the gap that divides them.

    • 1199

  • I cannot lead them unwillingly to danger Despite the bitter dejection recorded at the beginning of this entry to the letter,
    Walton recognizes the essential justice of a contract mutually agreed to and refuses
    to use the arbitrary authority contemporary law put in his hands to force the mariners
    to fulfill his purposes. The emphasis on the adverbial "unwillingly" carries political
    as well as ethical connotations.

    • 1198

  • a small quantity of laudanum This revelation helps greatly to explain Victor's manic changes of mood, from almost
    delirious emotionality to an impassive lethargy. Laudanum, a form of liquified opium,
    was a narcotic freely available in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In those
    days its usage lacked the social stigma that would be attached to it by later cultures
    and it was commonly employed in all stations of society. Thomas DeQuincey's Confessions
    of an English Opium-Eater was published in its first version in two installments of
    the London Magazine in 1821, three years after the publication of Frankenstein, making
    his literary reputation overnight. Percy Bysshe Shelley seems to have used laudanum
    to dull the pain of the chronic nephritis from which he suffered. Mary Shelley, however,
    was also well aware of the more consequential abuses to which laudanum lent itself.
    Her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the American
    Gilbert Imlay, committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum in November of 1816, while
    Mary Shelley was still in the early stages of her novel. Thus, this detail must be
    seen as colored by that tragic event. At the very least, it is a further indication
    of the deep instability of Victor Frankenstein's mind at this juncture of his career.
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