Notes 2/27

"I will be with thee on thy wedding night": Victor thinks he'll be killed by the monster on his wedding night, not Elizabeth. He was so self-involved that he doesn't realize the monster could have killed him already and that he was attacking Victor's loved ones rather than going after him.

What if they're the same person? Could the monster and Victor just be two different personas of the same person?

Nobody but Victor sees the monster until the very end. Only his loved ones are killed because they won't be able to hurt him the way his mother hurt him when she died. Both the monster and Victor use "wretch" to describe both each other and themselves; it seems wretch and all variations thereof stand for something bad in the novel. "I murdered her. William, Justine, and Henry - they all died by my hands." Victor puts the monster's crimes in his own hands. Hegel's theory, the idea of the relationship between master and slave, states that the master needs the slave so much that the roles switch and the master becomes the slave and the slave the master; a mirror of his own powerfulness: a wretch (Victor) looks in the mirror and sees a wretch (the monster) or vice versa. "I would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven." Paradise Lost

Victor wants to be the One, the One to create and destroy life. Is there any reason a person would want to be completely alone in the world?