Simple etiquette might dictate Victor's withdrawal, so as not to intrude his relatively
unfamiliar presence on Justine's heart-felt conversation with her friend Elizabeth.
Still, his active attempt to distance himself seems as characteristic of his personality
as is the egotism that enfuses his private meditation.

To the Catholic Justine this is an oath of considerable gravity, condemning her if
false to an eternity in hell.

Frankenstein refers gnomically to Henry Clerval, whom he will introduce in the first
chapter of his narrative (I:1:11).

Frankenstein refers gnomically to Henry Clerval, whom he will introduce, in this 1831
edition, at the beginning of the second chapter of his narrative (I:2:2).

Beginning here, Victor portrays himself as having an instinctive interest in science
that will drive his entire existence, particularly once he arrives within a university
setting and can devote himself to scientific investigation (I:3:1).

This is the second close male friendship in as many lines (see the note to "friend").
Since friendships reflect character in this novel, the intimacy Alphonse Frankenstein
feels for Beaufort (I:1:2) and the elder Clerval (I:2:5), both of whom share a sternness
of resolve and a narrow preoccupation with business success, may suggest a comparable
rigidity, or at least a stiffness and lack of flexibility, in Victor's father. Victor
will himself shortly note these traits in respect to how his father oversees his development
(I:1:16).

As with many of her interpolations in 1831, Mary Shelley here seems intent on an early
establishment of a pattern that will reappear and become more intense in its significance
as the novel progresses. Such psychological turmoil will produce a state of nightmare
and half-sleep on the night after the Creature is created (I:5:3) and will reveal
itself in Volumes 2 and 3 by a chronic and, in the end, debilitating fever.

This phrase is inserted in so unobtrusive a manner as to pass almost without a reader's
comprehension of its drift. The unmistakeable suggestion, however, is that the course
of Victor's and his family's lives might have been altered if he and Clerval had been
candid about the depth and cause of his illness. Yet, Clerval is at no fault, since
he, too, is kept in the dark. Only Victor at this point could alter the narrative
logic he has set in motion: among its other aspects, his illness constitutes a deep
refuge from both reality and his responsibility for its nature.

What Wordsworth calls the "correspondent breeze" (The Prelude, I.35), the dynamic
response of the human imagination to natural or divine inspiration, is a frequent
theme among the first generation of English Romantic poets (particularly Coleridge
and Wordsworth) and has been much discussed by critics (see, for example, M. H. Abrams,
"The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor"). Closer to home, the same correspondence
will become the motivating force in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"
in 1819.

To disobey such an injunction, with its almost institutionalized cultural sanction,
is to commit a transgression of substance, preparing us for other instances of conflicting
goals between son and father—Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein, Felix De Lacey and
his blind father—on other narrative levels of the novel, as well as other, much greater
transgressions for the sake of knowledge. The fact that Walton is orphaned at a young
age introduces yet another common theme of the novel.