Quote Analysis

When the prison nurse asks if Victor is feeling better, he responds that he wishes the events leading to his imprisonment were only a dream.

Victor's conditional clause—'if it be all true, if indeed I did not dream'—treats reality as something still under negotiation. He cannot or will not accept that Clerval is dead; instead, he hedges with double conditionals, linguistically holding open the possibility of escape. This refusal to commit to the reality of what has happened positions him as unreliable, retreating into subjunctive uncertainty rather than reckoning with fact.

Support a thesis that Victor's narrative is unstable at moments of crisis—his retreat into conditional grammar ('if it be all true') reveals someone who cannot fully admit what he knows.