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marks, foreshadows the plot with a heavy ominousness. We perhaps have forgotten by
this point that on this issue there has been a much earlier foreshadowing, as in I:L4:26.
marks, foreshadows the plot with a heavy ominousness. We perhaps have forgotten by
this point that on this issue there has been a much earlier foreshadowing, as in I:L4:26.
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immediate consequences to his act. His susceptibility to dismiss, or just miss, the
logical point, however, is not so much the result of chronic thick-headedness as it
is the effect of the egotism through which he filters all experience. His characteristic
assignment of a "destiny" to himself likewise testifies as much to his sense of self-importance
as to the determinism by which he attempts to deflect moral responsibility for his
actions from himself.
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If the reader regards this phrase ironically, it would seem commensurate (or nearly
so) with death. The last third of Frankenstein is dominated by the withdrawal of its
protagonists behind psychic barricades that wall them off increasingly from the forces
of life. Again, one senses the context of P.B. Shelley's recently-published Alastor;
or, The Spirit of Solitude behind Mary Shelley's text.
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reflects the devastation of Europe during the last phase of the Napoleonic Wars. However
self-serving or self-pitying we may find Victor's comparison, its political edge is
unmistakable and is perhaps intended by Mary Shelley, like other incidental political
observations in the novel, to insinuate a viewpoint that could not be explicitly stated
in the political climate of England in 1818.
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even at the end Victor cannot be sure that he responds to anything concerning his
own situation with total disinterestedness. His frank admission is touching in its
expression of a simple, unapologetic humanity.
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This curious locution calls attention to itself, and it would seem purposefully so,
as being distinctively Miltonic. It is a verb used by Adam in Paradise Lost when pleading
with God to create a second being with whom he can share his existence:
Of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight: wherein the brute
Cannot be human consort. (VIII.389-92)
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become heavy indeed, for, however extreme his rhetoric, he seems wholly unconscious
that this is the fate he has bestowed upon his Creature. And given that what he utters
here comes with the burden of a sudden shift to the total retrospect of Walton's cabin,
he seems strangely unable to acknowledge that this is the fate he has bestowed upon
himself as well. From a few days after the marriage onward, Victor does, in fact,
desert Switzerland for ever to pursue the Creature far and wide across national borders,
the two of them sharing a state of permanent "exile."
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family unit. It is his point of stable reference throughout the novel (see also I:1:28,
I:6:2).
1280
in 1472. There are eight principal islands, as well as other smaller ones of the type
Victor chooses: in all, the group amounts to seventy islands.
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a "guiding spirit" (III:7:26 and note) as he embarked on the Arctic ice fields. Yet
what he appears to be telling his sister and her readers here is that Victor's only
solace is in madness, and that for so deeply alienated a creature madness is preferable
to sanity. If by this statement he is recognizing that Victor is actually mad, it
raises considerable questions about what constitutes the truth contained by either
narrative—Victor's, certainly, but also his own which relies exclusively on Victor's
for its authority.