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

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.

A few paragraphs before, the Creature was reintroduced to human society through observing
"violent gesticulations." Now Felix is seized by what is clearly an instinctive and
uncontrollable violence. This is the same youth who, inspired by the most noble motives,
has been habitually called "gentle" by the Creature in earlier chapters.

These lines, repeated by the Creature to Victor, apply directly to his conduct, indicting
his lack of both foresight and responsibility. They are also sadly ominous of the
further degree of alienation faced by the Creature if this present mission fails.

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.