This would appear a premonition of the Creature's own experience with the De Lacey
family.

"Desert" here means "of the wilderness" (cf. III:3:1 and note). This account, then,
exactly fulfills the prescription innocently thought by Victor as he approached the
alpine range, that these mountains might be "the habitations of another race of beings"
(II:1:12). Since Mont Blanc was first scaled only in 1786, the fact that the Creature
has taken up his abode there indicates just how superior to conventional human endurance
Victor has made him.

Victor's workshop, he reported earlier (I:3:9), was a cell at the top of the house,
separated in a complex way from the main part of the edifice. Presumably, the bedchamber
to which he fled at the awakening of the Creature (I:4:3) was on a floor below. There
the Creature wandered and awoke Victor who then in terror plunged outside. By some
means unknown to Victor and unremembered by the Creature, the newly created being
made his way from the house to the streets outside the courtyard, where Victor spent
the night, and thence into the countryside surrounding Ingolstadt, where at last he
fell asleep.

Given the nature of the injustice visited upon Felix and his family, it is especially
fitting that Volney's Ruins should form the basic educational text in the cottage.
We should recall that it is from that book that the Creature learns, and Felix and
Safie are bitterly reminded, of the necessities of wealth and rank (II:5:16).

The Creature implicitly reaffirms his part in a natural order and his own affinity
with nature. Once again, we are reminded that in his composition there are non-human
creaturely attributes (see I:3:9 and note) that fit him for the wild.

There is a marked similarity here between the sense of honor of Felix and that of
Alphonse Frankenstein after rescuing the daughter of his old friend Beaufort from
poverty (I:1:5).

The marmoreal cast of this sentence throws the emphasis on the family unit. Whereas
before the Creature had seen a patriarchal family as nurturing civilized values (II:7:6),
here he has reason to interpret it from a contrasting perspective, as harboring the
equivalent of ethnic prejudices on a small, tightly formed, and exclusionary scale.
With that perspective in mind one might return to the family unit that Victor Frankenstein
left a few hours back to consider how little different is its underlying ethos (II:1:3).

As at the beginning of this chapter, so at its end the Creature is willing to repress
his own desires to accord with the normative expectations of humanity. Although human
beings cannot endure his sight, he will inure himself to make ugliness aesethetically
acceptable to his eyes.

On an uncomplicated psychological plane Mary Shelley is representing the simple dynamics
of the Creature's alienation. With no other presence to balance or feel for this injustice,
in his solitude he works himself into a confirmed opposition to the world that has
rejected and threatened him. The Enlightenment virtues of benevolence and sympathy,
were they ever to be encountered by the Creature, would by their very nature undercut
his introverted and exclusionary mental state and enforce a social communion. Once
again, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude," published
in March 1816, we recognize that solitude constitutes an evil spirit leading one to
ill. The opening paragraph of Volume 2, in which Victor Frankenstein reveals himself
similarly introverted and plotting revenge as a means of assuaging his self-hatred
is, indeed, an appropriate introduction to this dynamic that arches across the volume
(see II:1:1 and note).

The language seems intended to invoke both hell and the grave as being synonymous
with Victor's sense of himself, in the previous paragraph, as an "evil spirit." Behind
this language a reader may sense the solitude of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, won
by Life-in-Death and obsessively reenacting his guilt.