The reader cannot help noticing how insistently this theme returns to the surface
of the text. In the abstract it is almost an epitome of the way in which Mary Shelley
creates the structure of her novel as a nest of Chinese boxes (or Russian dolls).
Here, Victor Frankenstein begins a narrative about his life by emphasizing his father's
profound affection for another man, an account he gives to a young explorer whose
deepest emotional need is for such a friendship. Walton, in turn, feels he has found
the fulfillment of this need in Victor, and Victor himself tells this narrative out
of a sense of duty to that friendship. Duty likewise drove his father in his attempt
to discover and rescue Beaufort. At the periphery of this replicated order is the
central location in which the narrative unfolds, a ship isolated in treacherous northern
waters where the all-male crew stands on its duty on behalf of one another. In the
end harsh circumstances will force Walton to respond against his will to his own duty
to those men.

Victor seems very much the type of friend for whom Walton was longing in I:L2:2, and
his solicitude for the stranger's welfare clearly changes the dynamics of his shipboard
routine. Nothing will be reported as occuring aboard this ship for almost a month
while Victor through the narration of his life becomes himself a troubling aspect
of Walton's own existence.

The "astonishment" of two paragraphs earlier has transmogrified into a much deeper
suspicion on Walton's part. The reader should take the doubt that is planted here
seriously, since questions concerning Victor Frankenstein's sanity will intensify
as the novel continues, becoming pronounced late in his narrative—which is to say,
in the novel's chronology, only weeks before his rescue.

A major hazard of navigation in polar regions was a wholesale distortion of magnetic
instruments caused by the proximity of the pure magnetic impulse. Walton seems to
expect that once the actual pole is reached, one could learn the principles by which
to adjust for such distortion. In 1831 Sir John Ross for the first time located the
magnetic pole, which is distinct from the actual geographical pole, in the far northern
reaches of Canadian territory. His account of his supposed discovery bears an enthusiasm
and rhetorical inflation little different from the tone Walton adopts here. From the
evidence gathered in the Parry and Ross expeditions of 1827 and 1829-31, respectively,
Michael Faraday was, indeed, to do just that, as promulgated in what became known
as Faraday's Law. A different desire seems to be drawing the novel's second searcher
for the north pole, and the one who will presumably discover its exact site a full
century before Commodore Parry, Victor Frankenstein's Creature. In Walton's fourth
letter to his sister (I:L4:3) he innocently recounts being passed by this figure on
his way to the pole. See also "wondrous power" above.