The Outsider (short story)

The Outsider (English original title " The Outsider ") is a horror short story by HP Lovecraft, written March to August 1921. It was first published in the magazine "Weird Tales" in April 1926.

Content

From the first-person perspective tells an unspecified imagined narrator of his life in a dark, deserted castle and his longing for light and human society. Everything he knows he learned from dusty books in the library. He has no idea how he got in this castle, but seems to have always lived there.

It is impossible for him to leave the castle, because as soon as he has a piece of the castle, which is surrounded by dark forests removed, an inexplicable fear that forces him to turn back immediately comes over him.

Finally, he sums up the desperate decision to climb the highest tower, which proves to be a perilous undertaking, as the staircase is destroyed at a certain height. He manages to climb on the inner wall of the tower to a platform, which he reached by a stone trapdoor in the floor. There shocked him that he is not as expected is at a great height, but at the level of a nocturnal landscape in the moonlight, he roams now. He comes to another castle that resembles his home eerily, with the difference that in the interior in a brightly lit room is a feast in progress.

Full of joy at this discovery, the narrator enters the hall, followed by a panic those present formed under the, hastily leaving the room. The narrator discovers behind a curtain a repulsive creature that seems to be moving towards him as he stretches out his hand to him and touches a surface polished glass.

Analysis

Unlike in many other stories of the author, in which the character only has to exceed a threshold type to get to the level of the uncanny, the protagonist is here from the beginning in an environment that is dark, unreal and not just human- commonplace appears.

In Lovecraft's stories we know so little about the most personal and psychological backgrounds of the protagonists. Nevertheless, they represent not the average person, because they are all outsiders who stray because of a cognitive process, which it pulls from the sphere of everyday life into the realm of the macabre and non- human, of the Company.

In the " outsider " This principle is its extreme: The unnamed narrator embodies hardly a person, but appears almost as pure consciousness, which seems to be the only or last of its kind The process that goes through the narrator and drives the plot. less here leads to a vision of cosmic horror, but the horror is more in the hopelessness of being thrown back on itself one, which is after the climax of the cognitive process, the look in the mirror is disclosed.

Swell

• Louise Norlie: Existential Sadness in H. P. Lovecraft 's " The Outsider " (English )

Expenditure

• Lovecraft, Howard P.: "The Best of H. P. Lovecraft ". Suhrkamp, ​​July 2002 ISBN 351839052X ISBN 978-3518390528 and