I had no right to claim their sympathies
Given the novel's insistence on sympathy as an essential moral attribute
of an individual human being and a just society, Victor's drawing away
so wholly from normative family intercourse is an alarming event. That he is
scarcely able to speak to his family suggests a psychological condition that
in modern parlance would seem to border on psychosis. It is ironic that
the Creature's passionate demand for an end to his solitude should result
in Victor's own recoil into a solitude almost as utter and just as
fraught with danger to himself and to others.
