Quote Analysis

The next morning, Victor wakes to rain and mist obscuring the mountain peaks that had comforted him the night before. Undeterred by the worsening weather, he decides to climb Montanvert alone.

Victor's rhetorical question dismisses the storm in a tone of defiant bravado, yet the weather he claims not to care about directly mirrors his inner 'dark melancholy' from the sentence before—making his dismissal read as denial rather than courage. The abrupt, decisive syntax of the second sentence ('My mule was brought') shifts to action without transition, as if Victor is forcing himself forward to avoid reflecting on what the storm might mean. This refusal to read natural signs as relevant to his emotional state ironically blinds him to the pathetic fallacy Shelley has constructed—the storm is narratively preparation for the Creature's arrival.

Support a thesis that Victor is an unreliable reader of his own story—his insistence that external conditions (weather, nature, even his Creature) are irrelevant to him reveals his inability to see how deeply he is shaped by what he tries to ignore.