I see by your eagerness
Victor's highly conscious sense of the effect of his narrative, from now on,
will become a continuing motif (see also, for instance, 1.3.8). That he is self-conscious as an
artist may be thought a normal attribute of Romantic texts. But Mary
Shelley may have a more specific object in mind that that of fitting
smoothly into her culture's expectations. Victor's conscious
manipulation of his reader (Walton and, beyond Walton, us) continually
intrudes on the supposition of its truth.
