These words of Victor Frankenstein are from Chapter 5; however,
Victor's anxieties are already suggested in Chapter 4 as he tells Walton how engrossed he had
become in his work. While he has been enthusiastic about his work, at the same time, Victor has
some misgivings about what he has been doing:
Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became
nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf staratled me, and I shunned my
fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a
crime.
Having "lost all
soul or sensation but for this one pursuit," Victor has lost much of his essence as a person and
become obsessed with only the creation of a man. So, on the November night when he tries to imbue
life into the "lifeless thing" that lies at his feet, he feels "an anxiety that almost amounted
to agony." Wondering what will occur, in what form his long efforts will result, causes an angst
within Victor Frankenstein. He agonizes that he may have exceeded the reach of a human being; he
is tortured by this reach that may not become what he has desired.
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