my selfish despair
If the terms in which Victor recounts his regaining a sense of
responsibility cannot easily be reconciled with a disinterested ethics,
one senses in this phrase a tone of self-accusation reflecting a more
mature understanding of his own implication in the catastrophic events he
has unleashed. This acceptance of responsibility is not uniform, returning
only sporadically in the later chapters of the novel, but it testifies,
perhaps, to a measure of moral growth; or, if Victor's vindictive diction
places that conclusion in some doubt, at least to a sharper sense of the
price that has been paid for his solitary ambition and withdrawal from
normative human interactions. Still, suspecting that Victor's
self-important posture as family protector will only eventuate in great
calamities, a reader may find it hard not to cast an ironic eye upon what
continue as usual to be good intentions never sufficiently thought
through.
