the course of nearly three volumes containing Victor's narrative, we have come to
assume that it is a straight-forward account, unmediated by another voice. Now we
are forced to recognize that what we have read in this simple understanding has been
twice edited, first by Victor, and then by Walton acting at Victor's behest. What
Walton first wrote has in its second draft not only been "corrected," but "augmented,"
added to, leaving us with the uncomfortable feeling that mistakes could still survive
in the text, or that they could have been accidentally or—much more worrisome—deliberately
introduced in the process of editing, or that further areas for augmentation might
still exist that, if properly elaborated, might materially change the focus of our
perspective. In other words, Mary Shelley, having just merged two distinct narrative
voices and their respective audiences, now further destabilizes her text as an embodiment
of a fixed, immutably true account of its personalities and events. Our knowledge
is indeterminate and relative, wholly dependent on those voices that filter it.