Quote Analysis

Discovering that the child he has seized is William Frankenstein, the Creature realizes the boy is related to Victor and decides to kill him.

The dash in 'my enemy—to him towards whom I have sworn eternal revenge' creates a pause that mirrors the Creature's thought process: he's connecting the dots in real time, and the syntax enacts his realization. The word 'first' in 'first victim' is chilling because it's forward-looking—he's already planning a series of murders, not acting in blind rage.

Use this to argue that the Creature's violence isCalculated rather than impulsive—the deliberate syntax and the word 'first' show he's thinking strategically about how to hurt Victor, which makes him morally complicit even as the novel has encouraged our sympathy.