responsibility, he described to his father as "some destiny of the most horrible kind"
(III:4:41)? 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 (III:7:5)? Or is it that he knows himself
to be self-curst, as he earlier surmised at the beginning of the second volume (II: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]" (I:7:30). 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.).