tears gushed from my eyes
Victor's emotional instability is underscored by this sudden
excess of sensibility. That his rekindled joy will soon be
transformed into the despair his isolation in the boat had
prefigured is indicative of the irony in which, from the point in
which he spurned his Creature's desire for sympathetic rapport,
he finds himself invested. Later, hope will come to him in a
"burning gush" of ironically inverted expectation (3.7.8).
