Why does Victor abandon the creature?

Victor flees because success disgusts him. He has spent months imagining a beautiful triumph; the living body — yellow skin, watery eyes, the details he chose and then cannot bear — shatters that fantasy. Abandonment is instant, physical, and morally lazy: he sleeps, dreams of Elizabeth turning into his dead mother, and wakes to find the creature gone because he would not stay in the room.

Shelley does not treat this as a momentary panic he later repairs. Victor keeps choosing secrecy over parenthood. He frames the creature as a demon so he does not have to answer the creature’s claim: you made me, therefore you owe me regard. The novel’s body count is the price of that first exit. An answer that stops at “the creature was ugly” repeats Victor’s excuse; the chapters show a creator who can assemble life and cannot tolerate responsibility.