Mary Shelley's emendations of 1831 once again link early statements in Victor's narrative
with his condition when he is rescued by Walton's crew, a frantic and paranoid specter
whose otherworldly mystifications, as expressed in the late chapters of Volume 3,
are a driving force in his obsessive pursuit of the Creature. It is interesting to
note that even this late in her work on the novel Mary Shelley is recalling the machinery
with which Percy Bysshe Shelley invested his poem centering on the uncompromising
pursuit of a love object, "Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitiude," published in March
of 1816, shortly before the two left for Switzerland.