Erik,                 New stuff
Because I now realize you are very pressed for time, I am going to take
what time I can from work to try to give you the baby steps through the
basics. This will be nutshell stuff. There is far more worth going into later.

In the first sentence we learn that Mrs. Saville is on the lookout for trouble.
Why not adopt her view?
Brother promises that he will kill no albatross. He will be cool prudent, do nothing
rashly. Godwin says don't make promises. Make good decisions and that means
make principled use of information already in hand (which often raises questions
that lead to finding more info).
Brother is described as a man who would not let
a stranger die at sea.
A stranger comes aboard near death and in a few days is much recovered.
During the period of time between telling the story and that recovery
something appears to have changed. We later see the stranger is many times
appearing to be dead.
The story told contains errors and was revised a lot by Victor.
The major discrepancies are these:
Victor first saw England' cliffs in late December
Victor arrived in England in early October (the following year?)
Victor says he listened to the creature's story to learn if, as he suspected,
the creature had murdered his brother.
But before Victor has heard that confession of murder, the amount of time
after spring had come and before the creature got near Geneva is too great
to allow that little Wm. was still alive. Just add up the periods of time and
May 7th could only be a time of arrival if spring had come unusually early
that year. But in Victor's account he says that spring was unusually late that
year.
The evening Victor destroyed the female creature, the sun had gone down
and the moon was rising. He says he set out from the island to dump the
remains on the fourth day, when the moon rose between two and three in
the morning. Very important. Thomas Paine says the universe is the deist's
Bible.  True religion is the process of understanding truth. The moon (check
links to moon and sun cycles at this week section of this site.) testifies that
something like six to twelve days have elaspsed, something a navigator would
know.
Brother does not question these huge discrepancies, which suggest that the story is
a fabrication. Who would be the person to ask about this? The creature.
Brother has clearly not been prudent. He seems to be unbalanced to say the
least. He warns us in a letter we may never see of the monster. Yet although the
ship is stuck in the ice and vulnerable to mischief day after day, the is not the
slightest hint that brother has warned his crew. When they come, they are only
worried about the ice.
Now for more than 180 years no teacher, no author has said hey, maybe these
errors are deliberate, maybe they are part of the mental exercise mentioned
in the preface. Maybe Mary Shelley saw her father's point, maybe that is
what she meant when she said that she wanted her novel to not leave
the reader morally or mentally weakened.  Preface! She left these "errors" in the book although she made many other changes. Why? Maybe that is what she meant the story Victor told to have in it.

Wm. Godwin wanted to write a Roman history and help to restore
virtue. That would mean showing why the Romans made a distinction
between religion and superstition. That would mean finding flaws in
our institutions and correcting them. But those who benefit from the
imperfections will not have it. His publisher said no, sorry we can't
have you write a Roman history like that. Mary not only introduces
Plutarch in such a way that we know if the creature ever got a chance
to pick up Livy or Cicero or any of the other many fine Roman
books, he would consume it.
 There are a number of pages on this site that fill this out more and the
book To a Candid World which I am now in process of revamping
is something I think you will find interesting. I'll send you a copy when
it has its fresh face.
But, Erik, go to the final scene of the novel in you mind. The creature,
so says our brother, disappeared in the dark and distance. How
much foresight has our brother had? Can we rely on this as the end?
Is the the best we can hope for? Hasn't our brother broken his
promises and now placed himself and his crew in the greatest danger?
These questions are all raised by the machinery Shelley so carefully
crafted and which has been ignored for 180 yrs plus. Why do
we accept other people's impressions?
Tertullian is the church person Godwin uses to represent his difference
with Christianity (Percy Shelley liked Jesus by not the institution of
church, which limits the questions that may be asked about discrepancies
in the Greek Bible). Tertullian says education and reasoning are not
important.  Spinoza points out that there is a confusion in the church between
faith and credulity.
metaphor son of man set in a scheme that is more like Roman satire than
anything for centuries and there is so much more that is why I say hail Mary Shelley!
Kitchen door

The perfection Godwin says we may achieve is really no more than the
change for the better we would be able to make by recognizing that
which has not worked out as we wanted it to and examining how it went
wrong and doing what we can to fix it. In Walton's case it would be to
ask the obvious questions and act accordingly. He then would not be
doing another's wrong. Note that Walton plays God when he condemns
the creature for not truly being repentant. If he had asked the questions of
Victor or, failing that asked those questions of the creature, Walton would
do something based on truth or a search for the truth. We may think that
corruption is the cause of evil doing, but the young Russian woman's
father means her no harm. It is his moral tendency, unguided by principled use
of the information he has, that causes him to act in a way that is harmful and
quite against his goal. Yet for a time he must think he has no choice if he is
to remain honorable.

Who is the creature, if not a creation of Victor Frankenstein? We have seen
deformity in nature. In the Vitebsk story, which purports to be the truth not
told by Walton, the creature is thought to have been scarred by fire and so
traumatized that he had no memory of the events surrounding that horror.
He and Victor each had something the other wanted. But there could be
many possibilities.