which are to cease but with life
Another conspicuous feature of the final chapter is introduced here.
Although we are close to having completed the narrative circle, returning
to Walton's voice part way through this chapter, the continual shift of
time frames does more than remind us of this impending closure. The sudden
confrontation of past and future in a sentence such as this also serves
implicitly to suggest that at the point where Victor locked himself into
the hermetically sealed enclosure of his obsession, time began to lose
its normative distinctions.
