The Outsider (Short Story)
The Outsider (English original title "The Outsider" ) is a horror short story by HP Lovecraft , which was written between March and August 1921. It was first published in April 1926 in Weird Tales magazine.
content
From the first-person perspective , an unspecified narrator tells of his life in a dark, abandoned castle and his longing for light and human society. Everything he knows he learns from dusty books in the library. Not only does he have no idea how he got into this castle, but he seems to have lived there forever.
It is impossible for him to leave the castle, because as soon as he has stepped away from the castle, which is surrounded by dark forests, an inexplicable fear overcomes him, which forces him to turn back immediately.
Finally, he makes the desperate decision to climb the tallest tower , which turns out to be a breakneck undertaking as the stairwell is destroyed at a certain height. He succeeds in climbing the inner wall of the tower to a platform, which he reaches through a stone trap door in the floor. There he is shocked that he is not at a great height as expected, but on the level of a nocturnal landscape in the moonlight that he is now roaming through. He comes to another castle that eerily resembles his home, with the difference that a party is going on inside in a brightly lit hall.
The narrator enters the hall full of joy at this discovery, which causes panic among those present, who flee the hall in a hurry. Behind a curtain, the narrator discovers a repulsive creature that seems to be moving towards him when he reaches out his hand and touches a surface of polished glass.
analysis
Unlike in many of the author's other stories, in which the character first has to cross a kind of threshold in order to reach the level of the uncanny, the protagonist is here from the start in an environment that is gloomy, unreal and not exactly human- seems commonplace.
In Lovecraft's stories, one usually learns little about the personal and psychological backgrounds of the protagonists. Yet they by no means embody the average person, since they are all outsiders who move away from society due to a process of cognition that pulls them from the sphere of the everyday to the sphere of the macabre and inhuman.
This principle finds its extreme in the “outsider”: the nameless narrator hardly embodies a person, but appears almost as pure consciousness that seems to be the only or last of its kind. The process that the narrator goes through and that drives the plot forward leads less to a vision of cosmic horror, but rather to the hopelessness of being thrown back on oneself, which becomes apparent after the climax of the cognitive process, the look in the mirror, disclosed.
swell
expenditure
- Lovecraft, Howard P .: "The Best of HP Lovecraft". Suhrkamp, July 2002 ISBN 351839052X and ISBN 978-3518390528
