I was cursed by some devil, and carried about with me my
eternal hell
To what sort of devil can Victor be referring? Is it what,
exonerating himself from responsibility, he described to his
father as "some destiny of the most horrible kind" (3.4.9)? Or is it a more
immediately relevant sense that the world of the dead, which in
the previous paragraphs he has seen as impelling his mission of
revenge, has a fundamentally diabolical association (3.7.2)? Or is it that he knows
himself to be self-curst, as he earlier surmised at the beginning
of the second volume (2.1.1)?
Such an admission would involve acknowledging that the "devil" is
an internal spirit. Certainly, the continuation of the sentence
suggests such a recognition of the diabolical as a psychological
state, for it returns us to the conclusion of the first volume,
where Victor confesses that upon the execution of Justine Moritz
he "bore a hell within [him]" (1.7.9). Once again, the context
is supplied by Milton's Satan as he
reviews his career in
soliloquy on Mt. Niphates (see Paradise Lost, IV.73ff.).
