That is, he will not abide by rules of combat stipulated by human beings.

The Creature repeats his claim, which amounts to his saying that, like Adam, he was
created free of original sin.

With telling artistic assurance Mary Shelley has the Creature, who up to this point
has referred to himself only by personal pronouns, name himself with the same word
originally used by Victor, "wretch" (I:4:3). Here, however, he defines himself as
what King Lear calls "the thing itself . . . unaccommodated man" (III.iv.100). Perhaps,
indeed, Mary Shelley means us to hear in the insistent repetition of the word "wretch"
the memorable accents of that unsceptered, sorrowing monarch:

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
—III.iv.28-36

This is actually the second such vow. The first, uttered after being driven from the
De Lacey's cottage (paragraph 3 above above and note) was, upon sober (and mistaken)
self-reflection, withdrawn. This time the Creature will carry out his threat.

From 1796, when Napoleon invaded Italy until 1814 when he was exiled to Elba, in fact,
most of Italy was either under the rule or the strong influence of France, and with
the restoration of the old monarchies in 1815, although the politics decidedly changed,
the French influence on Italy remained strong. Whether it would in either case have
involved extradition from Livorno of a non-French national might be questionable,
but the Turk's fears are not entirely groundless.

The same phrasing was used by the Creature to describe his obsession with learning
to speak (see II:4:9). After all the variants on the term, applied to and linking
the intellectual passions of Walton, Victor, and the Creature, the reader is hardly
prepared to encounter it here in its primary sense, as an expression of uninhibited
and undeflected sexual instinct.

As in the infant grin with which the Creature greeted Victor after his birth (I:4:3)
here again we are suddenly reminded that he is a newborn, signalling his wants by
crying. But, cast off by his creator and forced to make his way into the world in
utter solitude, his wants are so enormous that here we are perhaps intended by the
similarity of diction to recall the timbres of one of the most famous songs of exile
(Psalm 137) in the Western tradition.

Although the Creature here gains the bitter satisfaction of forcing Victor to confront
his own responsibility for having created a being of such surpassing ugliness that
he himself cannot bear his sight, at the same time this aggressive gesture imposes
the threat of his great physical power upon his weaker creator. It sharply emphasizes
the aesthetic problem he poses for human beings; but this gesture does not by any
means seem limited solely to that end.

Whatever self-examination Victor undertakes, he cannot appear to see what the reader
does, that the same habitual obsessiveness regulates his thoughts, turned now, not
on a scientific experiment, but on the inner landscape of the mind over which he pores
with a customarily intense scrutiny.

The Creature delivers a sudden telescoping and radical interpretation of the mythic
text that stands behind this entire narrative, Milton's Paradise Lost. The point behind
the Creature's distinction is that Adam fell by knowingly commiting a sinful deed,
whereas Satan, in contrast, in this reading was intended to fall from heaven as an
intrinsic part of the conception of God's new creation. Most readers of Milton's epic
would not countenance a reading of Satan as more sinned against than sinning, but
it is the general interpretation that Percy Bysshe Shelley offers in the famous passage
of his "Defence of Poetry" devoted to the poem. Since that document dates from 1821,
five years after the beginning of Frankenstein, however well it glosses the antagonism
of Victor and his Creature, it ought not to be read in retrospect as explaining this
usage. One might, however, wish to argue that the representation in Mary Shelley's
novel either influenced her husband's interpretation or was worked out as a reading
in tandem with him. Whatever the case, the emphasis is unmistakeable here, that the
Creature sees himself as like Satan, "irrevocably excluded" from bliss, which—although
Milton (in Satan's soliloquy on Mount Niphates, IV.32ff.) tries to finesse the issue—is
how received theology forced him to represent the fallen archangel in his epic.