Horror Stories

I intended something a bit deeper on Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” tonight, but I’ll delay that till tomorrow night for two reasons: (1) Dr. Sturgis’s post hits on several key elements that deserve discussion. If you’ve not read “The Outsider” yet, it’s a very brief story that can be read in one short sitting or listened to via free audio. Take a minute to read it and join the discussion!

And (2), I have a very pressing question that needs an answer. From the story:

I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years – not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud.

So … where did he learn how to read?

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I’ll throw out a few ideas for you to consider as you read “The Outsider” (1921) by H.P. Lovecraft… (text and audio for the story)

1. Lovecraft himself called the story “my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.” Lovecraft’s friend, fellow author, and publisher, August Derleth, once wrote that, if “The Outsider” were found unsigned in an attic, it would “pass for a lost tale of Poe.” What do you think?

2. In his writings, Lovecraft repeatedly used light to symbolize knowledge and darkness to symbolize ignorance. What, then, should we take from his comment in “The Outsider” that “it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day”?

3. Scholars such as William Fulwiler have taken the epigraph to “The Outsider” (from Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, in which a baron and his warriors were “long be-nightmared”) to suggest that the story itself should be understood as the nightmare of the protagonist, just a bad dream. What do you think?

4. This last question contains significant spoilers!!!, so you may wish to skip it until you’ve read the story. Much has been made of “The Outsider” as potentially autobiographical, with the creature’s confesssion that “I am an outsider; a stranger in this century” expressing Lovecraft’s own perceptions of himself. (In fact, scholar Robert H. Waugh called his book about Lovecraft The Monster in the Mirror.) Certainly there is a degree to which Lovecraft was looking at himself through the story, mimicking how the monster discovers himself in the mirror.

This is not the first time in literature that self-discoveries were framed in this way, at least for the protagonist if not for the author personally: for example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” the main character dreams that he sees himself in a mirror and only then realizes he’s been walking about in his burial shroud. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature gains new awareness of his tragic plight when sees his own terrible reflection in a pond. Can you think of other examples of this kind of revelation in literature? [MirrorofErisedcoughMirrorofErised] What do you think of the idea of fiction as self-discovery and/or a mirror to the soul? The human condition?

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