I did not speak
This reticence about the Creature will come to have a self-perpetuating
momentum that will cause widespread harm. In the case of Clerval, it would
have been as easy for Victor to narrate his story as, later, it is
with Walton. His holding-back is obviously an important plot device,
but within the fiction itself it appears to reveal a deep, if
unarticulated, sense of guilt on his part.
