It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.

Although De Lacey's blindness allows the Creature unmediated access to him, another
reason he approaches the elder man is his instinctive veneration for those older than
he, a transference from the respect he would have accorded Victor Frankenstein.

The Creature's inherent generosity earns him this appellation, which is an ironic
reversal of that used by Victor Frankenstein to describe himself in the introductory
paragraph of Volume 2. There he conceives himself as wandering like "an evil spirit"
(II:1:1).

This seems another connection with legendary associations of Prometheus. In Percy
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Asia, the Titan's consort, credits him with responsibity
for our access to language: "He gave man speech, and speech created thought,/ Which
is the measure of the universe" (II.iv.72-73).

It is of some use to the design of Frankenstein that Victor go onto the Mer de Glace
by himself. At the same time, his rationale, that another human being would "destroy"
what he considers its "solitary grandeur," is characteristic of his constitutional
withdrawal into a contemplative introversion.

In his pain and anger the Creature imitates the actions of Victor Frankenstein twice
noted in the first volume (I:L4:10 and note; I:7:27 and note) and again at the beginning
of the second (II:1:6 and note). The Creature will again be portrayed as gnashing
his teeth in the third volume (III:3:13). The prototype for this behaviour remains
the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, VI.340.

The snowdrop, a common subject of poems on fragile beauty and mutability, often associated
with young women, in the late eighteenth century. Like the crocus, the snowdrop blooms
in late winter.

Up to this point all the expression of sympathy has come as a surmise of the Creature's
about the cottagers. This assertion reminds us that for something like a year the
Creature has intervened actively to assist the cottagers in their daily existence.
His fellow-feeling has, indeed, extended into kind actions on their behalf. The heavy
irony behind this scene is that all the Enlightenment virtues the Creature has presumed
to be attributes of the cottagers have been employed by him on a daily basis.

In ordinary circumstances this would not seem so absurd a question. The fact that
the Creature lacks a national identity, however, throws into relief how deeply embedded
are national prejudices even among the enlightened. We have already witnessed in the
French reaction to Safie's father (II:6:3) and in his abuse of Felix's kindness (II:6:12)
how mean-spiritedness is served by national identity. Part of Volney's aim in Les
Ruines is to eradicate such defining ideological concepts. That the Creature is thus
born without them indicates his superiority and, ironically, is a further example
of how he does not fit into normative human society.

Where Victor hedges, the Creature counters: as "evil passions" the phrase Victor employed
four paragraphs before, will disappear within an ambience of sympathy, so (as "vices")
they are the product of solitude. Again, we hear the resonance of the title of Percy
Bysshe Shelley's "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude," published a few months before
Frankenstein was begun (see II:8:21 and note).