I cannot forbear recording it
Walton, who cannot resist the impulse to continue a creation whose end he
cannot predict, bears an uncanny resemblance to the obsessive Victor
Frankenstein racing to the denouement of the Creature's birth in Ingolstadt (1.3.6). The difference, and it is one
maintained throughout the novel's self-reflexive mirroring of its own
operations, is that writing has no effect in the world until it is read.
The writer's obsession with the text may seem both narcissistic and
solipsistic, but this antisocial dimension is confined to a conceptual
plane. Still, Walton's unselfconscious acquiescence in the claims of what
seems to him irresistable reinforces our sense that what drives Victor is
little different from the passions we all share as human beings.
