1432

  • you, my friend Not since Volume 1 (I:3:13, I:6:18 and note) have the narrative lines been broken
    to remind us of the circumstances in which this story is being told. As was the case
    in those instances Victor signals a new intensification in the circumstances of the
    plot, with Henry Clerval reentering the novel.

    • 1431

  • a year ago At this point in the year before Victor and Henry resided in London and were preparing
    to transfer their center of activity to Oxford. Elizabeth must be referring to the
    despondent period the summer earlier, following Victor's confrontation by the Creature
    beneath Mont Blanc.

    • 1433

  • young man As the weight of circumstances and of tragedies accumulates it may be somewhat difficult
    to remember the actual chronology of the novel. Victor is yet only 24 years old.

    • 1430

  • Wretch! At this late point in the novel this vocative is literally true, and the Creature
    will acknowledge it so three paragraphs later. Still, we have to recognize that we
    have come full circle: Walton addresses the Creature with the appellation employed
    by Victor Frankenstein immediately after his creation (I:4:2 and note) and again upon
    reencountering him on the Mer-de-Glace of Mont Blanc (II:2:5 and note). Two sentences
    later he will reiterate Victor's linguistic leap into transcendental terminology,
    demonizing the Creature as a fiend. In his response the Creature picks up on the shift
    in signification, comparing himself both to Adam and to Satan.

    • 1408

  • I tried to conceal Although Clerval has just been described as like a "former self" to Victor, the difference
    between them involves more than the effect of experience on each man's sense of well-being.
    Victor is, in effect, living a lie, and his lack of openness to Clerval is the actual
    wedge by which their division is being enforced.

    • 1414

  • one vast hand was extended With his "hand . . . stretched out, seemingly to detain" his double, the Creature
    replicates the gesture in which he first appeared before Victor's eyes, in his bedroom
    in Ingolstadt (I:4:3). The reaction of Walton to his monstrous presence is in stark
    contrast to that evinced on that previous occasion by his creator.

    • 1416

  • the love of virtue The Creature unwittingly echoes the language with which Victor surveyed his past
    life after the execution of Justine Moritz (II:1:1).

    • 1376

  • tears gushed from my eyes Victor's emotional instability is underscored by this sudden excess of sensibility.
    That his rekindled joy will soon be transformed into the despair his isolation in
    the boat had prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in which
    he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport, he finds himself invested.
    Later, hope will come to him in a "burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation
    (III:7:22).

    • 1375

  • the sympathy of a stranger In accentuating his own lack of any ties but the common ones of humanity, Mr. Kirwin
    quietly establishes his link with Walton, who in the immediate context of the narrative
    recital has likewise altruistically attended to Victor's well-being without any sense
    of obligation or self-congratulation.

    • 1378

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