Blind Read Through: H.P. Lovecraft; The Outsider

What a beautiful, haunting story.  This innocuous story, may very well be the most important of all the stories I have read thus far.  It is the story of a person (probably a man) who has lived thier entire life in a castle.  There are trees outside that cover all light, and he is too terrified to go far away.  There is one tower in the castle that goes beyond the canopy of the trees, so one day he climbs the tower, and finds that he is in yet another building, yet this one is at ground level.

The ground level is the first shock of this story, but the more I dig into it, the narrator does not tell of thier childhood.  It seems as though they just attained consciousness in the lower castle.  Around them were bones and corpses of other humans, but this fact does not bother the narrator.  In addition, the narrator understands (English?) language, but cannot speak it.  The reason is given that there is no one to speak to.

Once the narrator gets above ground they wander for a while and see a church and another castle which looks much like the one he’s been living in underground.  He smiles, because there is a party going on in the castle.  He goes to join them, and when he gets there the entire party is terrified at his appearance (it is fairly obvious at the time, but it is solidified at the end of the story…the last shock), and they run away.  The narrator thinks there is a presence in the room and looks around, eventually seeing a horrid creature.  He tries to scream out in English, but all that comes out is “a ghastly ululation”, instead of any kind of human scream.  The narrator also says this is the first and last thing he ever uttered.  The narrator is looking in a mirror.  He then leaves the castle and goes wandering through the night, calmed by the fact that he’s a monster, a creature of the night, so he will prowl like one.

First off.  He has no childhood.  He comes to memory as a being that can think and read.  He also thinks that he’s a human, or that he once was.  This means that he has undergone a transformation, and when he is woken, he is a creature.  The fact that he’s interred underground could mean that his transformation was an affect of the Great Old Ones.  maybe he was one of the previous narrators of one of the other stories, and he and his fellows were trapped in this tomb (they are the other corpses and skeletons), and for some reason he was transformed.

He has to go through great strides to get out of the underground castle, which could mean it was a castle build to honor the cthonians.  There were efforts put into place to keep him in, inferring that he could be dangerous.

There seems to be a correlation between this story and “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Lurking Fear”.  Arthur Jermyn has a man procreating with an ape like creature, and the Lurking Fear has an ape like creature (actually multiple ape like creatures), and in fact the narrator of the Outsider is described as ape like at one point.  Could the White Ape from Arthur Jermyn actually be a woman who was transformed by the Great Old Ones?  Are the Ape like creatures in all of Lovecraft, actually people who have been transformed and submit to their new proclivities?  Because of how this story is framed, I think that’s the case, it is not creatures from another plane (at least these ape like creatures), or the moon, but in fact humans who have been influences by the madness of the Elder Gods, or the Great Old Ones and have been transformed into beasts.

What do you think?

Join me next week for a blind read through of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.  Because of the length of the story, i will be doing it one section at a time, so this story will consist of five blind reads, and possibly a sixth to sum the experience.