1357

  • The spirits of the departed seemed to flit around As the chapter continues the tentative "seems" of the shadow cast by the dead is
    sharpened by Victor into a certainty. The dead become the enablers of his action and
    he sees himself increasingly as acting upon their behalf. Again, Mary Shelley's psychological
    portrait here is subtly telling: a person who has given up all sense of individual
    will has surrendered the central principal of vitality and may, indeed, be considered
    to have become an agent of death.

    • 1356

  • this glorious spirit This is the second time that Walton has referred to Victor Frankenstein as "glorious."
    Although less obviously allusive to Milton's characterization of Satan in Paradise
    Lost than the earlier reference (III:Walton:6 and note; see also I:L4:22), the verbal
    repetition serves to underscore with some finality the parallel with the fallen archangel.

    • 1355

  • the spirits that I had invoked to aid me This observation strengthens Victor's faith in an unworldly sanction for his mission
    of destruction. Yet, the forceful egotism by which Victor empowers himself, justifying
    his actions as divinely decreed, also suggests what today we would call a megalomania.

    • 1354

  • The spirits that guarded me Two paragraphs before Victor hypothesized the active intervention of the spirit world
    on his behalf. By this point he has convinced himself that he is under their protection.
    This is a further example of how in the last pages of his narration Victor moves further
    and further beyond the boundaries of a normative rationality.

    • 1353

  • a spirit of good The context strongly suggests that it is the ever-watchful Creature who is sustaining
    Victor's life throughout his long voyage, not the heaven-directed spirits that Victor
    imagines. Thus, this phrase is heavily weighted with irony. The irony is in fact attenuated,
    for Mary Shelley could not have written this phrase without consciousness of P.B.
    Shelley's title, "Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude," the poem he published in 1816,
    three months before the excursion to Lake Geneva. An alastor in Greek is an evil spirit.

    • 1352

  • the spirits of the dead The character of the "guiding spirit" (III:7:17) is darkened even more by this representation
    of the walking dead hovering around Victor and encouraging his desperate venture into
    a world of death. Although such macaberie is conventional to the gothic mode, its
    psychological impress here is new and startling.

    • 1351

  • so unfeeling a speech Victor's reflection on the nurse's lack of charity and sympathy is surely justified,
    but it has a double edge, reminding the reader of a similar abstracted indifference
    with which he has treated a being with far more substantial claims on his interest
    and attention.

    • 1350

  • soon lost amid the waves The Creature disappears not only with the same superhuman speed but also in much
    the same language as accompanied his previous departure from Victor's ken, on the
    Mer de Glace below Mont Blanc (see II:9:18).

    • 1349

  • wishing for some mighty revolution Victor's desire for an externally applied apocalyptic solution that will break the
    logical circle he cannot escape is as characteristic of him as the passivity into
    which he actually retreats from the stress of events. Still, his figure resonates
    against his contrasting application of the turning wheel a few paragraphs earlier
    (see III:4:12 and note), where its every revolution was conceived as bringing new
    calamities upon him.

    The term "mighty revolution" cannot but retain some of its political charge in the
    context of post-Napoleonic Europe, particularly if connected to the world of undiscriminated
    wretchedness that Victor had been contemplating before Mr. Kirwin entered to prepare
    him for his father's arrival (III:4:21).

    • 1348

  • some destiny Victor's perhaps unconscious withdrawal into vague euphemism to match his father's
    rhetoric here strongly suggests a lack of candor. It also indicates that, however
    self-accusing he may be, he has accepted no real responsibility for the actions of
    his Creature.
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