This spring appears to wipe the slate clean for Victor in Ingolstadt as well (I:4:19).
For the Creature, no less than for Victor Frankenstein, however, the past cannot be
so easily forgotten.

"Partly from curiosity" Victor wandered into Professor Waldman's lecture and thence
into the scientific career that culminated in the birth of his Creature (I:2:14).
As this instance may indicate, the import of this essential human attribute for good
and bad—other examples will be found in I:L1:2, I:L4:11, I:L4:31, I:1:22, and I:7:1—has
been emphasized throughout the first volume of Frankenstein.

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.