In this phrase the Creature encapsulates what will become the dynamic force of the
third volume, an intense desire turned inside out and thus ironized, so that hatred
is pursued with the single-minded obsession of passionate love.

This was the easiest route into Italy, across southeastern France from Chambery to
Turin in northwestern Italy. The Mont Cenis Pass rises to only 6825 feet. This was
Napoleon's invasion route to Italy in 1796, and thereafter the post-road was improved
to allow uninterrupted traffic between the two countries. It was this road, indeed,
that the Shelleys themselves would take shiortly after publication of the novel, in
March 1818, on their trip to Italy.

The reference seems again to be to Paradise Lost (IV.49-53), and specifically to Satan's
attempt to break the chain with which God links all his creatures in an eternal sharing
of selves.

Felix's companion is the owner of the house, who holds as security a quarter-year
deposit that because of his abrupt departure Felix will have to forfeit.

In effect, the Creature asks Victor to look the other way and listen to his story.
We will recognize the similarity of this plea to that made to the blind De Lacey when
the Creature first attempts to establish human community later in the volume (II:7:15).
Throughout Frankenstein sound, rather than sight, is the means by which human sympathy
is evoked.

An appeal to justice must necessarily depend on compassion, fellow-feeling. This is
the only occasion in the Creature's existence where, even momentarily, he has been
accorded what we assume to be that fundamental right of human beings.

This is, it should be obvious, the novel's second such condemnation of an innocent
victim after a summary trial.

Here we encounter the first, ironic sign of Victor's bonding with his Creature. He
first called him a "wretch" in the second paragraph of this chapter (I:4:2), and has
just reiterated the epithet two sentences before this. Victor's adverb may seem innocent
enough, but when juxtaposed with the many instances later in the novel in which he
and his Creature will exchange places or nomenclature, it functions as a clear opening
signal of the complex narrative patterning to come.

Here what had been ambiguous in the earlier use of the word "wretch" (I:4:2) hardens
into monstrosity, a condition beyond the realm of the human. By the end of the paragraph
the Creature, in Victor's view, will once more transmogrify into a further dimension
of estrangement, the supernatural.

Age is always relative. Mary Shelley was some two months shy of her twentieth birthday
when she began writing Frankenstein and well past twenty-one when the novel appeared
in print. Moreover, before she began the novel toward the end of June 1816, she had
registered experiences highly unusual for a young woman in the constrained environment
of Britain, including eloping with a married man and twice giving birth. That said,
it is true that the author was in years yet an adolescent when she wrote this novel
and that, historically speaking, most of its readers have been struck by a range of
knowledge, maturity of conception, and intellectual ambition unusual in one so young.