What the Creature does not know is that this will also be the last such expression
of kindess directed to him.

At the beginning of the chapter he bore the neutral term "being"; but, as Victor indulges
his rage, so the Creature's identity changes for him as well.

Nothing in the Creature's statements in the previous paragraph—particularly given
the stark alternatives he lays before Victor at its end—suggests that he is exulting
at this point. Rather, the remark along with the epithet convey Victor's intrinsic
sense of superiority and of his right to wield a power capable of affording satisfaction
to an underling. Whatever Victor may regard as "the duties of a creator," they do
not yet forestall him from calling his creature a "fiend" and regarding him as "odious."

As with the double resonance of "wretch" at the end of the previous paragraph, here
Victor applies to himself the term he had used to refer to the Creature three paragraphs
earlier.

Victor Frankenstein has already supplied additional details to elucidate the weather
being experienced here. The Creature, he recounts, was born "on a dreary night of
November," and the next morning dawned "dismal and wet," with rain pouring "from a
black and comfortless sky" (I:4:6). Although, if we then follow the Creature's account,
it subsequently cleared sufficiently for the light to seem oppressive to him, later
that night, the time to which he is referring in his narrative, it reverted to a seasonably
cold temperature.

Up to now the Creature has been remarking seasonal changes and their reflection in
the landscape. Here, suddenly, the sense of internal divorce and self-alienation already
present in the previous chapter (II:4:4, II:4:13) opens out into a split between past
and present selves equivalent, as the emphatic language might suggest, to Adam's fall
from paradise.

It would appear that a month or more has passed since the Creature's birth, and with
autumn's end he is experiencing the decrease of nature's bounty. We are now in December,
and early signs of winter have appeared.

The status of persona non grata, if somewhat unusual, was certainly not unheard of
in France either before, or after, the Revolution. Napoleon, in fact, became famous
for sending those who displeased him into exile. With one of these, Germaine de Staël,
he got more than he bargained for: resentful of her criticism of his authoritarian
rule, he banished her forever from French dominions, whereupon she set out on a long
tour of Europe, speaking out against the Emperor of France and attracting legions
of admirers wherever she went. One reason that she established herself at Coppet and
gathered around her a set of pan-European intellectuals was that she could not return
to Paris. Mary Shelley, in the ambience of Geneva in the summer of 1816, would have
well aware of this record. Madame de Staël's last book, published posthumously in
1820, was called Ten Years of Exile. Whether Napoleon was afforded a copy on St. Helena,
his island of exile in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is unlikely. Nonetheless,
Germaine de Staël decidedly had the last laugh.

Mary Shelley's insistence on the deference of daughters to fathers might be logically
connected with her dedication of this novel to her own father; at the same time, it
is rather at odds with her mother's views, and particularly with her running argument
against Rousseau's views on female education in Book 5 of her Vindication of the Rights
of Woman. What is odd in the present case is the fact that Felix does not mirror Agatha's
reaction. His stance suggests something of the distance between son and father already
accentuated in the case of Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein.

Although we are apparently returned here to Alphonse Frankenstein's worries over "immoderate
grief" with which the volume began (II:1:3). We are reminded both that "misery" is
the last noun of Volume 1 and that the Creature ended his account of his life with
the declaration of his own misery (see II:8:36 and note).