Again, the creature seems to echo Victor Frankenstein (though, since Victor's narrative
to Walton postdates the Creature's by several years it is actually he who is engaged
in echoing). Wherever in the narrative nesting we look to find a foundation for its
truth, we discover both Victor and the Creature seeking to establish the evidence
that will verify their accounts and using almost identical language to do so. One
may thus compare this utterance with those of Victor to Walton at the beginning (I:L4:30
and note) and end (III:Walton:2) of his narrative. That the "evidence" comes from
the centrally embedded narrative, the story of Safie, is thus taken to lend credibility
to all narrative strands that subsume it. But, of course, these putative copies of
letters depend entirely on the Creature's word for their authenticity: so there is
actually no documentary foundation whatsoever for the "truth" of any of these fictions.
Still, it is indicative that Victor Frankenstein produces the letters to convince
Walton of his veracity (III:Walton:2).

This is subtly touching diction: the Creature has convinced himself that he has mistaken
the De Laceys and recasts them in the role in which for many months he had conceived
them to act: see II:5:22 for his recognition that he has invented this appellation.
The De Laceys, of course, have never consciously done the Creature any good whatsoever.

In England at this time a man without property had no vote: thus the very idea of
citizenship, of having a "stake" in the system, was tied to possession of property.
Of course, as the Creature will learn in the subsequent chapter, both Safie and the
De Laceys as exiles are also excluded from this polity, but they have family or friends
to rely on for support.

That the root cause of the family's sorrow is not exile nor even a personal loss,
but rather an economic condition, carries radical political overtones of a type that
a later generation would call Marxist.

A large carrying-case with two compartments, what in modern English is called a suit-carrier.

Again (see paragraph 2 above), the Creature names himself by the same word (although
it here carries a different connotation) that Victor first uses in I:3:2.

Like the deaths of Justine's siblings (see I:5:6 and note), this is an intrusion not
necessary to the plot, but underscoring the tentative nature of the human condition
and the threats to happiness to be remarked everywhere in this novel.

Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans are sometimes known as "Parallel
Lives" because of the author's method of presenting a prominent Greek and Roman in
tandem, then comparing their achievements.

Rousseau testifies to the importance of the Lives in his early education in Confessions,
book I.

It would appear that Safie has sold some of the jewelry with which she left Livorno
(II:6:19).

Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem, was originally published in 1667 in ten books,
then revised by its author into the twelve-book form in which we read it today shortly
before his death in 1674. Containing the major creation myth of modern Europe, its
impact on Frankenstein is major and discernible from beginning to end. In the immediate
context of the Creature's discovery rather than of Mary Shelley's intertextual conception
of her novel, however, what is most significant is how he reads the epic as a key
to his self-understanding, even perhaps his self-fashioning.