This is one of the two clearly identifiable but irreconcilable dates in the novel:
the other (Monday, 31 July) is contained in Walton's fourth letter to his sister (I:L4:1).
It has been noted, however, that the shift of one day here (to Thursday, May 8) would
reconcile the timeframe, allowing us to date the year of William's death as 1794 and
of Walton's letter as 1797.

The details of this paragraph are all intended to be ugly and repulsive to the reader,
but this quick reference has a particular force to it, reminding us that the Shelley
household was vegetarian. The torturing of animals in medical experimentation would
have been felt by Mary Shelley to be thoughtless cruelty. It is ironic, and clearly
not intentional on Victor Frankenstein's part, that his Creature turns out also to
be a vegetarian.

Victor's egocentric concentration on his own reaction is more than simply ungenerous:
it reveals a sense of class and gender superiority that is deeply troubling.

This double emphasis on his impotence calls into play both the heavy irony of Victor's
having given birth by himself and his habitual manner of ducking responsibility for
his actions.

Surely, Victor, like any human being, has a right to pursue happiness. But it is the
case, that, beginning here, on every occasion when he anticipates a return to normal
human pleasures he experiences instead a disastrous reversal of expectations. From
this moment on his joy will never again be "unbridled," but rather, at best, what
Thomas Gray, in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," called "fearful."

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry:
Still as they run they look behind,
And hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy. (lines 35-40)

Before, we had only Victor's intimation that he had somewhat procrastinated in communicating
with his family (I:3:10). From Clerval's remark we learn that he had all but ceased
to write them.

This additional blindness removes all doubt that Victor himself, at the very least,
sees a moral flaw in his having spurned his family. In essence, to ignore one's loved
ones is to break one's basic ties with the natural.

Victor does not realize the irony implicit in his words, as he describes this initial
abrogation of his responsibility and his transfer of obligation onto his newly made
Creature. It is the Creature who thus innocently asserts his shared bond, only to
find himself spurned by his Creator. Yet there is also a secondary irony behind the
first, for this account is narrated by a man who has been spending his recent months
singleheartedly pursuing the being from whom he originally ran away.

Victor is implicitly drawing a contrast between the educational program he was provided
by his father and the lack of such a discipline in Walton's formative years lamented
by the mariner in his conversation with Victor some ten days earlier ( I:L4:25 and
note). The recurrence of this theme is manifestly deliberate on Mary Shelley's part.
What the reader is to derive from it, however, is not so certain, since there are
clearly ways in which, whatever his deficiencies in languages or in systematic application,
Walton's moral education will serve him better in the course of this novel than does
Victor's.

These were, as Victor Frankenstein had been reminded the evening before (I:6:20 and
note), shut at 10 o'clock every night.