Up to now the Creature has been remarking seasonal changes and their reflection in
the landscape. Here, suddenly, the sense of internal divorce and self-alienation already
present in the previous chapter (II:4:4, II:4:13) opens out into a split between past
and present selves equivalent, as the emphatic language might suggest, to Adam's fall
from paradise.

Victor Frankenstein has already supplied additional details to elucidate the weather
being experienced here. The Creature, he recounts, was born "on a dreary night of
November," and the next morning dawned "dismal and wet," with rain pouring "from a
black and comfortless sky" (I:4:6). Although, if we then follow the Creature's account,
it subsequently cleared sufficiently for the light to seem oppressive to him, later
that night, the time to which he is referring in his narrative, it reverted to a seasonably
cold temperature.

What the Creature does not know is that this will also be the last such expression
of kindess directed to him.

This calm reconsideration of his actions attests to the analytical capacities of the
Creature and pictures him once again as superior to those who spurn him. On a darker
side, it also exhibits him in the process of internalizing himself as Other and of
reifying a concept of normative reality in which he lacks any secure place.

Where Victor hedges, the Creature counters: as "evil passions" the phrase Victor employed
four paragraphs before, will disappear within an ambience of sympathy, so (as "vices")
they are the product of solitude. Again, we hear the resonance of the title of Percy
Bysshe Shelley's "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude," published a few months before
Frankenstein was begun (see II:8:21 and note).

In ordinary circumstances this would not seem so absurd a question. The fact that
the Creature lacks a national identity, however, throws into relief how deeply embedded
are national prejudices even among the enlightened. We have already witnessed in the
French reaction to Safie's father (II:6:3) and in his abuse of Felix's kindness (II:6:12)
how mean-spiritedness is served by national identity. Part of Volney's aim in Les
Ruines is to eradicate such defining ideological concepts. That the Creature is thus
born without them indicates his superiority and, ironically, is a further example
of how he does not fit into normative human society.

Up to this point all the expression of sympathy has come as a surmise of the Creature's
about the cottagers. This assertion reminds us that for something like a year the
Creature has intervened actively to assist the cottagers in their daily existence.
His fellow-feeling has, indeed, extended into kind actions on their behalf. The heavy
irony behind this scene is that all the Enlightenment virtues the Creature has presumed
to be attributes of the cottagers have been employed by him on a daily basis.

The snowdrop, a common subject of poems on fragile beauty and mutability, often associated
with young women, in the late eighteenth century. Like the crocus, the snowdrop blooms
in late winter.

In his pain and anger the Creature imitates the actions of Victor Frankenstein twice
noted in the first volume (I:L4:10 and note; I:7:27 and note) and again at the beginning
of the second (II:1:6 and note). The Creature will again be portrayed as gnashing
his teeth in the third volume (III:3:13). The prototype for this behaviour remains
the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, VI.340.

It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.