Quote Analysis

Victor speaks to the magistrate who has just expressed doubt about capturing the Creature. Defending his obsession with revenge, Victor admits it is a vice but insists it has become his sole motivating force.

The verb "devouring" transforms revenge from emotion into predator, suggesting Victor is being consumed rather than acting with agency. He "confesses" and "allows" revenge to be a vice, using language of reluctant admission that implies he sees the moral problem but feels powerless to resist—yet this very construction lets him evade responsibility by portraying himself as passion's victim. The phrase "only passion of my soul" isolates revenge as his entire inner life, suggesting he has become as single-minded and monstrous as the Creature he hunts.

Support a thesis that Victor's surrender to revenge completes his transformation into a mirror of the Creature—by describing revenge as 'devouring' him, he adopts the same language of helplessness the Creature once used, showing that the novel's true horror is not the Creature's monstrosity but the ease with which the 'civilized' man becomes equally consumed by destructive obsession.