The Creature has been "named" once before by Victor, in the prologue, as "daemon"
(I:L4:16). The nomenclature in which he is vested confers an initial identity upon
him that will shift overnight from this enigmatic term of alienation—meaning either
being unhappy or vile (from the Old English word for "exile")—to the wholly out of
bounds, the monstrous (I:4:3).

Walton's highly refined sense of good manners here keeps him from inquiring about
what had brought Victor to this desolate northern wilderness. His crew is much more
natural in its reaction. One may sense a certain class snobbery in Walton's tone here,
as there was in his earlier description of the sailors with whom he had to consort
(I:L2:3, I:L2:4). Of course, it might be argued that the class system that so rigidly
divided a ship's officers and its crew resulted in just such a dichotomy: it is not
to the crew that Victor will retail his painful autobiography, but rather to a person
of social breeding and intellectual ambition, if not education, comparable to his
own. On the other hand, it could be maintained that the tone here is wholly unintentional,
an unwitting reflection of the residual bourgeois tonality that Mary Shelley occasionally
betrays in her contemporary publication, A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, when confronted
with what she considers vulgar behavior.

The sense here of the son's challenge to the father's authority surfaces generally
throughout Victor's narrative. The question of justice that is here quietly insinuated
will become central to the conclusion of Volume 1 of the novel.

In contrast to the shared grief and affection of Elizabeth and Justine, Victor has
immured himself in a barricaded isolation, unable to attract sympathy and, through
his lack of candor, unable also truly to offer it.

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.

This is the first indication of the age of a character in the novel, but a careful
tracing of its chronology would prove that Mary Shelley maintains a shrewd sense of
the relative ages of all of them. The emaciated figure of Victor Frankenstein who
will appear before Walton four months after this letter ("I never saw a man in so
wretched a condition"— I:L4:9) is actually Walton's junior by a year.

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.

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.

This is in English an obsolete usage, though it is still current in French and Italian,
meaning "to await."

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.