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I’m only a little more than half-way through volume 2, but I noticed that while I was reading the “fiend’s” narration, it just didn’t sound believable to me. While I went through a couple more chapters, and learned that he was learning how to speak the language, it made a little more sense, but I still wasn’t that gullible. Does he have superhuman hearing, being able to listen in on conversations that far? It’s one thing to learn the names of objects, but how is he so grammatically smart?

It seems improbable that he could learn how to speak so abstractly in only a couple of years. What surprised me even more is that he also learned how to read and write! Is that even possible by just going off someone’s speech? Maybe I’m being too picky that this “fiend’s” narration is just not convincing. Granted, horror stories in general call for an open mind, but this fiend sounds way too intellectual to be possible. He even grasps concepts like “poverty”!

And if we look at it through the Theory Toolbox perspective, where Victor is the author and the creature is the text, does it mean that there are different ways to read the creature? For example, I assume Victor wanted his creature to have a different meaning than how he turned out. The villagers that he scared off would think that the fiend meant (danger to the village) something entirely different to them than what he means to Victor (something to be persecuted, a murderer, a living symbol of his mistakes, etc), or what he means to himself (perhaps someone trying to learn about the world?). Victor’s intended meaning of his text/creature came out completely different from how he wanted it to, so does fiend create his own meaning if he’s separated from his author?

- Amy Yu