to pursue my studies alone
Mary Shelley here suggestively reveals that Victor's self-education
involves no sense of social responsibility for the knowledge he might
attain. Victor's withdrawal from Elizabeth and barring of Clerval from
his confidence also initiates a pattern of being secretive about that
knowledge, whether it is in the construction of the Creature (1.3.6) or the withholding of evidence from
a court examining a murder (1.7.1).
That he has conducted his entire life without candor will increasingly be
seen to have implications for the veracity of the narrative, since, after
such a pattern of evasion becomes clear, the reader might well begin to
wonder why we should credit what he says in the present instance as the
unvarnished truth.
