Overall: Well that was a whirlwind of a chapter. Yeesh. Some good, some bad.
Adam is consumed with emotion over the incident at the De Lacey’s. First it isn’t sadness, though, but rage. He goes into the woods and exerts himself to collapsing by just raging against the entire situation he’s found himself in.
Then the next day, he begins to console himself, thinking that maybe he took off from the De Lacey’s house too quickly. After all, M. De Lacey had seemed to be coming around before Felix, Safie, and Agatha came back. Then, when he comes back to perhaps try again, he finds that Felix and his family have all basically decided to move out after the incident. It’s so blunt and painful. Adam never saw them again.
Taken into a rage again, Adam burns down the De Lacey’s house one night and decides that all of humanity is his enemy to some degree. In particular, however, he decides to seek out Vic in order to exact some kind of revenge upon him. He has to figure out where to go, though, and so eventually he heads southwest toward Geneva.
Along the road he’s overcome by a momentary compassionate impulse when he witnesses a young girl about to drown in a river. Taking her out and failing to resuscitate her, he’s set upon by some other person who presumably knows the girl. After following and being shot for it, Adam goes back into his rage and continues with his hatred for humanity renewed.
Eventually he comes upon Geneva and when he grabs a young boy who turns out to be William, specifically when William lets Adam know his last name is Frankenstein, Adam does the deed and strangles the child. Gotta say I’m pretty torn on this bit. From what little I know of the movies I’ve heard that they try to keep the monster more innocent in his behavior. If I recall, he accidentally drowns a child in that one, which is what causes the angry mob we all know and love. Here, it’s really complicated. On the one hand, I totally understand Adam’s utter misanthropy, he’s still a young being who’s convinced that he should be human but just can’t in some capacity. He has that sense of isolation that’s removing him from any sort of identification with people. But at the same time, I mean, he probably knows that William is not Victor. None of this excuses his actions, of course. I don’t think it’s supposed to. It does a very good job of making the situation very grey, though, with respect to whether his fury is justified, and more particularly if it’s justifiable to hate all of humanity.
I do think it’s a bit too convenient for Adam to do the whole picture-planting job in order to frame Justine. Like, that really worked out for him, huh? Really could’ve easily bungled that whole thing if Justine hadn’t happened to have taken the day off that day and to have had some connection to William and no alibi.
I also do kind of wonder at this from a writing perspective. Because I really think it kind of absolves Victor too easily. I mean, why should others critique him for his behavior, now? He was right about the whole thing. Not through any sort of deductive power, just through a series of hapless coincidence and chance. It kind of manages to just make it so that all of Victor’s concerns are at least somewhat more justified without him having had to come to any sort of personal transformation about it at all.
Anyways, by the end of the chapter, Adam demands that Victor make a female companion for him. An Eve? Is she going to have the weird hair? Umm… Adam, you maybe should've led with that before you got to the whole "I murdered your brother" bit. Maybe you didn't learn this part very well, but generally humans don't like hearing that you've killed their kin. I guess Adam may’ve thought that the whole truth needed to be told. But I mean, you started off with giving Victor the option to kill you if he didn’t like your story and you kinda didn’t stick the landing, there.
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