Well, it was about time someone called Vic out.
Not much really occurs this chapter in a plot sense. It’s mostly spent with Vic and the two main members of his family (poor Ernest) each kind of telling him off in their own way. Vic’s father’s advice, while coming at Vic from an angle steeped in patriarchal ideas of expression, does kind of tap into a problem that Vic seems to face. He can’t recognize that other people feel pain too. While I’m annoyed that Alphonse shames Victor for apparently grieving, it is irritating because his advice is actually kind of spot on. Just for the wrong reasons.
I mean hell, Elizabeth tells him that she’s been really shaken in her faith by the conviction of Justine, Vic makes it entirely about himself. She goes to worrying about him because he is so overwrought in everything about his expression that she has to wonder about his safety (which I’ll get to in a moment) during her own grief.
Here’s the thing though. Vic seems like he’s genuinely really rattled by the whole experiment thing. He needs to talk to someone about this. He contemplates suicide via drowning (which… yikes) to just remove himself from other people’s lives… I mean, I feel like he’s approaching this whole thing wrong. But I can’t deny that, whether or not he’s projecting the whole “monster murdered my brother” thing, he’s still so obviously out of sorts about the whole creating an abomination, thing.
I actually didn’t know that Frank in the book would be so torn up about this. Again, popular version of Vic seems to imply that he was rather proud of his creation, or at least proud of himself for having created it. We’re nearly halfway through the book and we’re still kind of on Vic’s trauma about the whole thing. It’s really cool though
[Later edit: I had this review typed out more fully and then my computer restarted without saving it, so I had to mostly retype it from memory. I think I've gotten most of it recounted, but I had already read the next chapter when I had to do the rewrite. guh.]
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