However obnoxious the Turk will himself appear within this account, the stress here
is on an arbitrary exercise of tyrannical state power over an individual's civil rights.

Refuse left over from a meal: given the Creature's fastidious vegetarianism, these
would seem to be part of the "roots and nuts" he goes on to mention as part of his
fare.

The seven-year old William seems to be drawing his points of reference from reading
fairy tales and romances. This is of a piece with the experiences of the older members
of the household when they were his age, particularly Henry Clerval, who wrote a fairy
tale at the age of nine and was passionately fond of romances (see I:1:11).

Here the Creature unconsciously echoes the sentiments of Victor Frankenstein ("if
our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free")
from earlier the same morning of their conversation (II:2:3). That the Creature speaks
of heat where Victor uses "desire" reflects his very first conscious experiences (II:3:3,
II:3:6), but desire is also at this point very much on his mind, as the ensuing paragraphs
will stress.

It is one thing for the Creature to utter a pantheistic oath (previous paragraph),
but to put a second immediately into the mouth of Victor is to emphasize that where
man plays God, he has no other deity to whom to turn to right his injustices but himself.

The elder De Lacey, we will soon learn, is blind.

To a later reader accustomed to the 1818 edition or to the customary biographical
terrain of Mary Shelley's family associations, these phrases come with a sense almost
of shock. Even within the terms set by the novel itself they do not seem to ring true
to the general distance kept thus far between the characters and conventional religious
expression. The reader has the choice of construing this interpolation as a sign of
a shift in Mary Shelley's rhetorical palette to accommodate an early Victorian religious
sensibility (which has been asserted by some critics). On the other hand, this could
be interpreted instead as an attempt on her part to prepare us for the deep, if primitive,
religious faith that will eventually be invoked by Victor to sanction his single-minded
pursuit of revenge against his Creature. In other words, not all rhetorical alterations
portend changes in the author's own opinions.

For all Alphonse's attempt to console Victor, his being exactly wrong about the source
of Victor's grief must be indicative of some narrowness or shortsightedness of his
own. His son William is his only concern, and he assumes the same family priorities
for Victor; but Victor knows that Justine has been murdered, too, and that more than
tribal loyalty is at stake. That the father's commitment to the "public situations"
(I:1:1) in which he has passed his mature years extends so little into actual social
benevolence must in some sense affect how we take his counsel and assess his notion
of virtue.

Victor's habitual passivity reasserts itself with a sharp irony that reminds one of
the physical deterioration he suffered in giving life to his creation (I:3:9). His
argument is that the Creature, empowered by Victor with life, has so used that power
that it has robbed Victor of his own ability to act independently.

Given the novel's insistence on sympathy as an essential moral attribute of an individual
human being and a just society, Victor's drawing away so wholly from normative family
intercourse is an alarming event. That he is scarcely able to speak to his family
suggests a psychological condition that in modern parlance would seem to border on
psychosis. It is ironic that the Creature's passionate demand for an end to his solitude
should result in Victor's own recoil into a solitude almost as utter and just as fraught
with danger to himself and to others.