The marmoreal cast of this sentence throws the emphasis on the family unit. Whereas
before the Creature had seen a patriarchal family as nurturing civilized values (II:7:6),
here he has reason to interpret it from a contrasting perspective, as harboring the
equivalent of ethnic prejudices on a small, tightly formed, and exclusionary scale.
With that perspective in mind one might return to the family unit that Victor Frankenstein
left a few hours back to consider how little different is its underlying ethos (II:1:3).

There is a marked similarity here between the sense of honor of Felix and that of
Alphonse Frankenstein after rescuing the daughter of his old friend Beaufort from
poverty (I:1:5).

The Creature implicitly reaffirms his part in a natural order and his own affinity
with nature. Once again, we are reminded that in his composition there are non-human
creaturely attributes (see I:3:9 and note) that fit him for the wild.

Given the nature of the injustice visited upon Felix and his family, it is especially
fitting that Volney's Ruins should form the basic educational text in the cottage.
We should recall that it is from that book that the Creature learns, and Felix and
Safie are bitterly reminded, of the necessities of wealth and rank (II:5:16).

Victor's workshop, he reported earlier (I:3:9), was a cell at the top of the house,
separated in a complex way from the main part of the edifice. Presumably, the bedchamber
to which he fled at the awakening of the Creature (I:4:3) was on a floor below. There
the Creature wandered and awoke Victor who then in terror plunged outside. By some
means unknown to Victor and unremembered by the Creature, the newly created being
made his way from the house to the streets outside the courtyard, where Victor spent
the night, and thence into the countryside surrounding Ingolstadt, where at last he
fell asleep.

"Desert" here means "of the wilderness" (cf. III:3:1 and note). This account, then,
exactly fulfills the prescription innocently thought by Victor as he approached the
alpine range, that these mountains might be "the habitations of another race of beings"
(II:1:12). Since Mont Blanc was first scaled only in 1786, the fact that the Creature
has taken up his abode there indicates just how superior to conventional human endurance
Victor has made him.

This would appear a premonition of the Creature's own experience with the De Lacey
family.

The Creature's intensity, like the suddenness of his admiration for Safie (II:5:4
and note), has the ring of adolescence to it. It is not, then, utterly surprising
that it should remind us of the diction of the two "ardent" men whose youthful discourse
we have already overheard: Walton (see I:L1:2 and I:L2:2) and Victor Frankenstein
(see I:2:7, I:3:1, and I:3:6). Burning desire is a characteristic all three share.

Desolation is, indeed, the appropriate term for a condition in which the Creature
is so alienated from his original state that he feels the rebirth of spring as an
ironic counterforce to his internal degeneration. Mary Shelley carefully marks the
inherent "unnaturalness" and thus self-destructiveness of such a psychological condition.

None of the cottagers, of course, has as yet to lay sight on the Creature. It is a
mark of how self-alienated his education has made him that he can presume such a reaction
without having to put it to the test.