Only at this point, at the end of the chapter, do we become aware that the Creature
has, up to now, no ability to relate linguistically, that he is still operating on
the non-verbal level of the sparrows and thrushes whose sounds he first discriminated
(paragraph 4 above). Although presumably the De Lacey family speaks during the ongoing
business of the day, except for the "few sounds" (paragraph 14 above) that were uttered
by the young man outside the cottage and by the old man when his music elicited tears,
this account is, as it were, rendered against a backdrop of total silence except for
the interlude of music. Mary Shelley's artistic refinement in rendering this silence
intensifies, in contrast, the importance of words and of communication for the world
of her novel.

As earlier, Victor's histrionic sputtering, even as it testifies at once to the explosion
of long repressed emotion and to his incapacity to handle the situation with which
he is suddenly confronted, is also revelatory on a conceptual level. His mind is totally
bound by the binary opposition of God and Satan in which he assumes not just creative
godhead but also the right of judgment and particularly that of damnation, appointing
this "fiend" and "devil" to the "tortures of hell."

An archaic usage, meaning to prepare or cook: only the nominative form—"dressing"—is
still retained in English with this original import.

The terminology here has a curiously political edge to it, particularly so after we
have witnessed the demonstration of social injustice in the final chapters of Volume
1.

The additional element that Safie brings to the emotional dynamics by which the Creature
learns what it is to enjoy a full humanity is erotic love. That Felix responds so
wholly to her presence as to seem physically transfigured perhaps underscores the
emphasis the Creature will hereafter place upon the creation of a mate that may, he
might hope, in some small part have a similar effect on him.

Not only a vegetarian, the Creature is likewise naturally (like the Shelley household
in general) averse to alcohol.

It is now early spring, the first spring for the Creature, and he observes its characteristics
without any previous example for comparison. The reader, however, already has experienced
Victor's transports over this "divine spring" (see I:4:19 and note) in the first volume
of the novel.

Since this noun and its derivatives tolls like a bell through the novel after it is
first used by Victor to name the Creature (I:4:3), there is a very real sense, on
a linguisitic plane, in which the condition is already broadly shared.

Victor reverts, as if by instinct (or psychological regression), to the nomenclature
in which he first invested his Creature on that dreary November night some twenty-one
months earlier when he brought him to life: see I:4:2-3 and note.

Although Victor continually flagellates himself for the deaths of William and Justine,
yet the hardening of his language as a means of self-exculpation and displacing his
guilt continues. As he interchanges "fiend" and "monster," he combines the diabolic
and the unnatural to objectify and distance his Creature from the norms he accords
his family.