The terminology here has a curiously political edge to it, particularly so after we
have witnessed the demonstration of social injustice in the final chapters of Volume
1.

Only at this point, at the end of the chapter, do we become aware that the Creature
has, up to now, no ability to relate linguistically, that he is still operating on
the non-verbal level of the sparrows and thrushes whose sounds he first discriminated
(paragraph 4 above). Although presumably the De Lacey family speaks during the ongoing
business of the day, except for the "few sounds" (paragraph 14 above) that were uttered
by the young man outside the cottage and by the old man when his music elicited tears,
this account is, as it were, rendered against a backdrop of total silence except for
the interlude of music. Mary Shelley's artistic refinement in rendering this silence
intensifies, in contrast, the importance of words and of communication for the world
of her novel.

The Creature travels west for three full days. Given his stature and endurance, one
would assume this would allow him to cover a large tract of south-central Germany.

This phrase stands with a startling contradictory purity against the elder De Lacey's
amiable platitudes concerning "brotherly love" (paragraph 25 above). Even worse, it
undercuts all the ideals for which Felix has stood as well as the intellectual command
by which he has restored his family's happiness and tranquillity. In a pinch Volney's
ideal of an open, accepting humanity gives way to an unthinking recidivism, a protective
and brutal tribalism, a masculinist belligerence, that is the moral equivalent of
war.

Compare Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc," lines 104-14.

That is, the Mer de Glace, the Sea of Ice, which is the horizontal glacial field fed
by three glaciers (including Montanvert) on the sides of Mont Blanc.

Since the issue of enslavement arises in a number of contexts in the novel, this instance
of it in the innermost narrative should not go unnoticed.

Victor refers to Ernest, now 17 years old. That he thinks it his duty to "protect"
his father and brother has an ironic edge to it, since his own continuing presence
and actions are what pose the immediate threat to their well-being.

The freshness of the Creature's emotional response to nature and to beauty, which
operates as a signal testimony to his unambiguous humanity and his inner capaciousness,
carries an increasingly ironic import where no one else will acknowledge his claims
to be human.

However this veneration of an ideal to which he might aspire testifies to the underlying
human sensibility of the Creature, the awareness to which his logic carries him, that
he is not part of the human family, places it within another and more pernicious construction.
In effect, he is internalizing a sense of profound alienation, becoming the Other
that society would make him.