The Outsider By Hp Lovecraft

Short story by H. P. Lovecraft

The Outsider
past H. P. Lovecraft
Cover of collection The Outsider and Others
State	Usa
Language	English language
Genre(south)	Horror
Published in	Weird Tales
Publication type	Periodical
Media blazon	Print (Mag)
Publication appointment	April 1926
Full text
The Outsider at Wikisource

"The Outsider" is a short story past American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written betwixt March and August 1921, it was first published in Weird Tales, April 1926.^[1] In this work, a mysterious individual who has been living lone in a castle for as long as he can call up decides to intermission complimentary in search of man contact and light. "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most commonly reprinted works and is also one of the almost popular stories ever to be published in Weird Tales.

"The Outsider" combines horror, fantasy, and gothic fiction to create a nightmarish story, containing themes of loneliness, the abhuman, and the afterlife. Its epigraph is from John Keats' 1819 verse form "The Eve of St. Agnes".

Inspiration [edit]

In a letter of the alphabet, Lovecraft himself said that, of all his tales, this story about closely resembles the style of his idol Edgar Allan Poe, writing that it "represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very superlative."^[2] The opening paragraphs echo those of Poe's "Berenice", while the horror at the party recalls the unmasking scene in "The Masque of the Reddish Death".^[three]

The story may also have been inspired in part by Nathaniel Hawthorne'south "Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man", in which a man dreams that he is walking down Broadway in a burial shroud, merely understanding the shocked reaction of passersby when he sees his reflection in a shop window.^[3]

Another suggested literary model is Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818), in which the creature causes a daze when he enters a cottage: "I had inappreciably placed my pes within the door before the children shrieked, and 1 of the women fainted." The monster later looks in a pool of water and sees his reflection for the starting time time.^[3]

Colin Wilson, in The Strength to Dream (1961), points to Oscar Wilde's short story "The Altogether of the Infanta", in which a misshapen dwarf is horrified to run across his reflection for the starting time time.^[3]

Some critics have suggested that "The Outsider" is autobiographical, and that Lovecraft was talking about his own life when he wrote, "I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are nevertheless men." An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia finds this analysis to be exaggerated, merely suggests that the story "may perchance be indicative of HPL's own self-prototype, particularly the image of ane who always idea himself ugly and whose female parent told at to the lowest degree one private virtually her son's 'hideous' face."^[3]

Synopsis [edit]

"The Outsider" is written in a first-person narrative style, and details the miserable and obviously solitary life of an private, who appears to take never made contact with another person. The story begins, with the narrator explaining his origins. His memory of others is vague, and he cannot seem to recall whatever details of his personal history, including who he is or where he is originally from. The narrator tells of his environment: a dark, decaying castle amidst an "countless wood" of loftier trees that block out the light from the sun. He has never seen natural light, nor another human being beingness, and he has never ventured from the prison-like home he now inhabits. The just noesis the narrator has of the outside world is from his reading of the "antique books" that line the walls of his castle.

The narrator tells of his eventual determination to free himself, from what he views as an existence inside a prison. He decides to climb the ruined staircase of the high castle tower which seems to exist his but hope to see the sky. At the place where the stairs end into crumbled ruins, the narrator begins a long, tiresome climb up the tower wall, until he eventually finds a trapdoor in the ceiling, which he pushes upward and climbs through. Amazingly, he finds himself non at the great acme he anticipated, but at footing level in another world. With the sight of the full moon earlier him, he proclaims, "At that place came to me the purest ecstasy I take ever known." Overcome with the emotion he feels in beholding what—until now—he had but read virtually, the narrator takes in his new surroundings. He realizes that he is in an old churchyard, and he wanders out into the countryside before eventually coming upon another castle.

Upon visiting the castle, which he finds "maddeningly familiar", the narrator sees a gathering of people at a party within. Longing for some blazon of human contact, he climbs through a window into the room. Upon his entering, the people within become terrified. They scream and collectively flee from the room, many stumbling blindly with their hands held over their eyes toward the walls in search of an exit. As the narrator stands lone in the room, with the screams of the political party vanishing into far away echoes, he becomes frightened at what must be lurking almost him. He walks around the room searching for what might be hidden in the shadows but finds null. As he moves towards one of the room'southward alcoves, he detects a presence and approaches it slowly.

In his shock and surprise, he loses his residuum and touches the animate being. Horrified, he runs from the building back to his castle, where he tries unsuccessfully to clamber back through the grate into his old earth. Cast out of his old existence, the narrator at present rides with the "mocking and friendly ghouls on the dark wind", forever and officially an outsider, since the moment he stretched his fingers towards the creature's paw in the alcove, and felt nothing but the "common cold and unyielding surface of polished glass" of a mirror.

Analysis [edit]

Horror historian Les Daniels described "The Outsider" as "arguably the author'due south finest work".^[4] Joanna Russ praised "The Outsider" as ane of Lovecraft's all-time stories, describing it as "poetically melancholy".^[5] Though some may contend that Lovecraft's "The Outsider" is purely a horror story, there are predominantly Gothic themes that play pregnant roles in this brusk story including loneliness, the abhuman, and the afterlife that take it to a more psychological level.

Loneliness [edit]

The narrator in "The Outsider" exists in a perpetual land of loneliness. At the onset of the story, it is revealed that he has lived for years in the castle but cannot recall any person ever existence at that place except for himself. Neither can he call up the presence of anything alive simply the "noiseless rats and bats and spiders" that surround him. He has never heard the voice of another human existence, nor has he ever spoken aloud. His but encounters with the outside world are those he attains from reading the erstwhile books that take been left within the castle.

Upon encountering humanity later in the story, the narrator is left even more than lonely than before. He has come to witness homo life and has been immediately shunned from it due to his appearance. Being outcast from the society he longed to know forced the narrator to continue living life as a recluse. All the same, this time it has been fabricated worse because what he has lost was no longer a vague idea from a book but a tangible affair held out of his grasp. He is the monster.

The ab-human [edit]

In Gothic fiction, ab-human refers to a "Gothic body" or something that is only vestigially human being and maybe in the process of condign something monstrous,^[6] such every bit a vampire,^[vii] werewolf, or in this case a walking corpse.^[8] Kelly Hurley writes that the "abhuman subject is a non-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of condign non-itself, becoming other."^[ix]

The idea of "becoming other" parallels what is happening in this story. The intensity of the procedure is heightened because the reader is learning of this transition from human to the ab-homo right along with the narrator who is learning it himself.

Connections to other Lovecraft stories [edit]

Ghouls make frequent appearances in Lovecraft'due south work, such as in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926), although they are by and large very unlike from the undead creatures described hither. This story also mentions Nitocris and Nephren-Ka briefly. Nitocris, a legendary queen of Egypt, also makes an appearance in the 1924 Lovecraft and Harry Houdini collaboration "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs". Nephren-Ka is mentioned in "The Haunter of the Nighttime" as the Pharaoh who built "a temple with a windowless crypt" to the Shining Trapezohedron, and "did that which caused his proper noun to be stricken from all monuments and records".

Adaptations [edit]

In 1964, Erik Bauersfeld narrated an sound adaptation on the old-fourth dimension radio program The Black Mass. This accommodation was later used as part of a limited edition LP release along with his sound adaptation of the Lovecraft story "The Rats in the Walls".
Roddy McDowall was the narrator of the story on a 1966 LP release (Lively Arts 30003) that too included the Lovecraft story "The Hound".
The 1995 Stuart Gordon film Castle Freak is based upon this story and "The Rats in the Walls". A reboot/remake of the 1995 motion picture was released in 2020.
In 2019, a modern-day adaptation of the brusque story, directed by Ludvig Gür, premiered at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.^[x] It played at multiple festivals and was picked up by horror-make Alter (a division of Gunpowder & Sky) for online distribution^[11] and was featured in the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Best of 2019 DVD Collection.^[12]
Season 4 of the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina features various Lovecraft entities as antagonists. In episode two, "The Uninvited", the Outsider is portrayed as a hideously filthy vagrant who asks for shelter, but murders anyone who does non invite him in.

Notes [edit]

^ Straub, Peter (2005). Lovecraft: Tales. The Library of America. p. 823. ISBNane-931082-72-3.
^ S. T. Joshi, explanatory notes to "The Outsider", The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Joshi, S.T.; Schultz, David E. (2004). An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Hippocampus Printing. pp. 198–199. ISBN978-0974878911.
^ Les Daniels (1975). Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. Da Capo Printing, P. 120. ISBN 0306801930 .
^ Joanna Russ, "Lovecraft, H(oward) P(hilips), in Twentieth-Century Scientific discipline-Fiction Writers by Curtis C. Smith. St. James Press, 1986, ISBN 0-912289-27-9 (pp.461-3).
^ Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction page 190 (Cambridge University Printing, 2002).
^ Peter 24-hour interval, Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil page 22 (Rodopi, 2006).
^ Chantal Bourgault Du Coudray, The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Animal Within page 132 (I.B.Tauris, 2006).
^ Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3. This quotation too appears in Robert Eaglestone, Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien's Classic folio 55 (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006).
^ "The Outsider". 8 August 2019.
^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Car: "Horror Brusk Film "The Outsider" | ALTER | H.P. Lovecraft Accommodation". YouTube.
^ "H. P. Lovecraft Picture show Festival Best of 2019 Collection DVD - limited edition".

References [edit]

Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984). "The Outsider". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (ninth corrected press ed.). Sauk Metropolis, WI: Arkham Business firm. ISBN0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1936]. "The Outsider". In Southward. T. Joshi (ed.). The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. London, Great britain; New York, NY: Penguin Books. ISBN0-fourteen-118234-two.

External links [edit]

Wikisource has original text related to this commodity:

A collection of public domain H. P. Lovecraft short fiction at Standard Ebooks
The Outsider at Faded Page (Canada)
The Outsider title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database