He means this in a literal sense: there is no one who feels with or for him, who accepts
him as a fellow human being.

The season is yet early enough that the produce of late-autumn is still growing even
with an early snowfall.

Like Agatha's dress in the previous paragraph, this is another sign of poverty, but
it is likewise an indication of how close to subsistence exists this entire family.
In this they share the condition of the Creature who attaches himself to them partly
on the basis of their simplicity of manners and means.

With pointed economy Mary Shelley returns to the context of Paradise Lost, once again
to emphasize the disparity between God's accomplishment and that of Victor Frankenstein.
This time it is centered in the figure of Eve, who is transfixed by her beauty when,
newly born, she happens to catch sight of her perfect form mirrored in a pool (IV.449-88).
In both the novel and epic, though the effect is differently pointed in each, we read
ironically against Ovid's account of the myth of Narcissus in Book III of the Metamorphoses.

Although the Creature cannot interpret the subject of this conversation, the gestures
should be sufficient for his comprehension. They mime the reaction he elicits in all
human beings.

The Creature acknowledges his fall from an original state of grace: "virtues" seems
to be deliberately Miltonic diction, invoking Satan and Adam (and Eve). The Biblical
context aside, this claim to a prelapsarian perfection is intended to remind Victor
of his own high ambition (see I:3:8) and to affirm how well, on an internal if not
external plane, it was realized.

This is the Creature's first observation of human society rather than the life of
nature, and it does not exactly accord with our normative sense of the civilized.
Yet, a wandering beggar himself, he accepts this without wondering why it should be,
leaving that question to the logical instincts of a reader with greater command over
social institutions.

Even to be able to ask the question suggests the extremity of alienation in which
the Creature exists and the extent to which he internalizes the values by which normative
human culture rejects him. The "then" is a significant index of the force of logic
that excludes the Creature from a recognizable place in the world.

The phrase echoes words used in the third sentence of this chapter, suggesting that
for Victor there is no imaginable change in his condition.

The Creature turns from Goethe's novel of isolated sensibility, where he sees his
own reflection (and we to some extent see Victor's) to contemplate the public and
civic models of Plutarch's biographical accounts, engaging a world of social interaction
and nation-building of which he has no experience whatsoever. Thus the accounts draw
him forth from his own isolation to imagine a larger cultural sphere of action in
which he might participate.