to undertake a voyage of discovery to the land of knowledge
Although Clerval seems lighthearted in his exaggeration, his phrasing
resonates with startling irony. Not only does it play against Victor's
obsession with acquiring knowledge at any cost, only just now having
attained its fateful consequence, but the diction, so like the language of
Walton's first letter (Letter 1.2),
reminds us that Walton himself would not be an auditor of Victor
Frankenstein's
life story had not both of them been in peril of their lives in the Arctic
wilderness.
