Although only mentioned here in passing, this is the novel's third unjust trial. All
its circumstances—from involvement of the elder De Lacey and Agatha, who had no part
in Felix's machinations, to the five-month pre-trial incarceration, to the confiscation
of the family fortune and their banishment—suggest an arbitrary and tyrannical abuse
of power by the state.

The Creature has not yet learned the concept of fictionality: from his naive perspective
all narratives are alike dutiful representations of reality.

This is the Creature's first sense of how he appears as a figure within a natural
order. It is not a pleasant discovery to find oneself a discordant presence, but,
as the ensuing paragraph relates, a kind of natural logic helps this eight-foot anomalous
being not to feel himself divorced from the natural order. On the contrary, he seems
instinctively able to recognize his affinity with it, even down to what he shares
with beings as tiny as sparrows.

The additional element that Safie brings to the emotional dynamics by which the Creature
learns what it is to enjoy a full humanity is erotic love. That Felix responds so
wholly to her presence as to seem physically transfigured perhaps underscores the
emphasis the Creature will hereafter place upon the creation of a mate that may, he
might hope, in some small part have a similar effect on him.

An archaic usage, meaning to prepare or cook: only the nominative form—"dressing"—is
still retained in English with this original import.

As earlier, Victor's histrionic sputtering, even as it testifies at once to the explosion
of long repressed emotion and to his incapacity to handle the situation with which
he is suddenly confronted, is also revelatory on a conceptual level. His mind is totally
bound by the binary opposition of God and Satan in which he assumes not just creative
godhead but also the right of judgment and particularly that of damnation, appointing
this "fiend" and "devil" to the "tortures of hell."

This recognition confirms how tellingly on the mark the Creature had been in earlier
confronting Victor with the habitual language of his father (II:2:7 and note).

The modern descriptive term for Victor's experience would be awesome. Although he
dwells on how satisfying is this kind of response to nature (and in the third edition
it is particularly accentuated), it is probably so because of its reliable alterity
from his own situation. In a few paragraphs, with startling irony, he will have that
dependability rudely broken, and the sublime will come directly home to the human
who, thinking to master it, had fled from its tremendous power.

Since this noun and its derivatives tolls like a bell through the novel after it is
first used by Victor to name the Creature (I:4:3), there is a very real sense, on
a linguisitic plane, in which the condition is already broadly shared.

It is now early spring, the first spring for the Creature, and he observes its characteristics
without any previous example for comparison. The reader, however, already has experienced
Victor's transports over this "divine spring" (see I:4:19 and note) in the first volume
of the novel.