This is the first word that Victor utters to his Creature. Perhaps, as the allusions
to Satan in the previous paragraph suggest, it is already in his mind. But, there
is a dimension to this epithet beyond its effectiveness as an index to Victor's mental
state, a timeless and mythic dimension. Although rigorously suppressed wherever organized
Christendom extended its arms into secular society, the writings of heretical theology,
particularly from Gnostic sects, continually revert to the concurrence of creation
and the fall as two aspects of a single event. Thus to create is to cast out, on a
universal level as well as, literally so, in childbirth. The cast-off in this case
functions as Satan in a dual sense—as a disrupter of the putative unity of God and
his coextensive creation, and—from the Hebrew root—as the accuser, who here immediately
upbraids Victor Frankenstein for not doing his duty by his creature.
Note how carefully Milton embeds this coincidence, without heretically stressing a
linkage, in the moment where God divides himself so as to function on a second level,
as a Creative Word, the Logos that will render God's conceptual blueprint for the
universe into a workable reality (Paradise Lost, V.594-617).