These are the first words that the Creature has ever uttered. As with the unexpected
control of his opening remark to Victor (II:2:7), one is taken aback by their sophistication.

Mary Shelley manages a quiet pathos from the simple satisfactions that for the new
Adam constitute Eden. The reader may at this point reflect, in contrast to the epithets
by which Victor has abused the Creature for a number of chapters in succession, how
naturally drawn to human society he is.

It was here, at the family's country house, that Victor had witnessed lightning strike
the ancient oak when he was fifteen (I:1:22).

The various relations of intercourse within normative family structures are a new
category of experience that the creature studies without being able to enact.

To compare the creature's sense of his original identity with that contained in the
opening sentence (I:1:1) of Victor Frankenstein's narrative is to mark a dramatic
contrast in self-conception and cultural endowment. Also, as has often been noted,
a second and striking context exists between these first memories and those of Adam
in representing himself to the Archangel Raphael in Paradise Lost (VIII.250-96).

The supposition is that the Creature has been able to remain within the general confines
of woodlands during this three-day passage. Now, he comes out into the open—which
is to say, into arable ground. Unwittingly, he is stumbling upon his first contacts
with human society.

In other words, the Creature is now a year old. During this revolution of the year
he has learned to speak and read French, has read four books and an account of his
creation, and has awakened to intellectual and emotional desire. The anniversary of
his creation suggests to him that he is now ready to start out on life.

The war of gods and titans first recounted in Hesiod's Theogony is likewise such a
heavenly battle: it was won by Jupiter only after Prometheus came over to the side
of the gods on the strength of Jupiter's promise to ameliorate the human condition,
a promise he later betrayed. Percy Bysshe Shelley develops this scenario in Asia's
long recital of the legendary history in Prometheus Unbound, II.iv.32ff.

To a later reader accustomed to the 1818 edition or to the customary biographical
terrain of Mary Shelley's family associations, these phrases come with a sense almost
of shock. Even within the terms set by the novel itself they do not seem to ring true
to the general distance kept thus far between the characters and conventional religious
expression. The reader has the choice of construing this interpolation as a sign of
a shift in Mary Shelley's rhetorical palette to accommodate an early Victorian religious
sensibility (which has been asserted by some critics). On the other hand, this could
be interpreted instead as an attempt on her part to prepare us for the deep, if primitive,
religious faith that will eventually be invoked by Victor to sanction his single-minded
pursuit of revenge against his Creature. In other words, not all rhetorical alterations
portend changes in the author's own opinions.

The elder De Lacey, we will soon learn, is blind.