Chapter 24 — the ice; Victor dies; the Creature's last speech

The pursuit lasts months. Victor follows the Creature north along the Russian coast, then onto the polar ice, in a sled the Creature has left him taunts to find. By the time he is picked up by Walton's ship — the moment the novel's frame story has been pointing at since Letter 4 — he is wasted, frostbitten, days from death. He is brought aboard. He recovers enough to tell Walton the entire story over the long days of the ship's freeze, and over the many entries we have just read. By the last chapter he has finished the narration. The novel returns to Walton's voice.

Within days Victor dies in Walton's cabin. He dies, by Walton's account, in a state of partial clarity — warning Walton against the polar voyage, expressing love for his dead family, asking that the pursuit of the Creature be continued. Walton sits beside him until the end. The night Victor dies, the ice begins to break. Walton's crew, who have been demanding for days that he turn the ship around, are no longer in mutiny. Walton has agreed to sail south as soon as the ice will allow.

That same night, after the body is laid out, Walton hears a voice in the cabin. He goes in. The Creature is standing over Victor's body, weeping. He has come, he says, to ask his maker's forgiveness, and to deliver his own ending. He gives Walton — and the reader — his final speech. He has murdered everyone Victor loved, he says, in retaliation for his own abandonment; he hates what he has become; he is the only living thing of his kind; there is no one in the world who can bear the sight of him. He is going north. He will build his own funeral pyre on the ice and burn himself alive. No one will hear his ashes; no one will read of him; the world will be free of the man who made him. He climbs out of the porthole onto the ice. The night is dark; he is "lost in distance and darkness" within minutes. The novel closes on Walton's letter to Margaret saying so. The frame is complete.