Episode 21 - The Outsider

[bar1scorpio]

... And that's when REM's Everybody Hurts started playing.

[Parallaxicality]

I get continually blasted for saying this story makes no sense, but I'm sorry; it makes no sense. OK; I'll accept that he remembers English from his previous life, and thus is able to read books without instruction. I'll accept that memories from his previous life also allow him to understand that he is hideous, despite never having anything to compare himself to. And I'll accept that is is possible, albeit massively unlikely, that someone could live utterly alone for hundreds of years and not once talk to himself (perhaps his vocal chords had rotted away).

BUT...

If, as is supposed, he is an undead creature underground, then how was he able to run out of the building into the "forest" of tree roots? If he could see to read, how did he never notice his own body?

[DMcCool]

I am under the assumption that everything happening prior to his crawling out of the grave was all happening in his head.  His slow, but eventual "awakening" was made logical by his own mind's attempt to understand what it was experiencing.  In reality, I think he stirred a bit in his coffin as a corpse, and then clawed his way up and out.

[Kaelestes]

If he could see to read, how did he never notice his own body?

Self denial is a cruel mistress.

[andy9279]

Maybe I was just slow or taking this tale FAR TOO LITERALLY when I first read this story, but I didn't think it made a lot of sense either, and what sense I made of it was quite different from everyone else's.

At the end of the story I concluded that the main character was some sort of diseased leper or perhaps deformed outcast of a (very rich) family which locked him away as a child.  It seems to me that the first part of the story is fairly detailed in describing the place where he lives as if that's literally where he lives, reading books, staring at candles...but I like the interpretation that he is an animated corpse better.  Either way I think this story is pretty strange, even for Lovecraft.

[MAS]

I really got the sense that everything in the original castle was memories of his former life and therefore, limited by his memory (so he couldn't go further than the forest).  The protagonist is always going to be interpretted as a bit flaky on the cognitive side...he's dead, he's a ghoul so the level of introspection your asking of him can be easily waived I think.  Obviously, these things have to be overlooked to make the twist at the end work.

I really, really (that's 2x reallys) enjoyed this story.  I love the tragedy of this guy liberating himself through desperation and having a moment of, "Yay, I'm walking the world, loving life again...where are the babes" only to be followed by the crushing realisation of who/what he really is.  In modern terms you see the twist coming a mile off...I wonder if it would have sneaked up on the reader back in the 1920's?

[Kaelestes]

After reading everyone's interpretations I thought I had misread this story to an extent, but after having at The Outsider a second time I don't think I misread anything. Both times I got the distinct impression that the so called "trees" were in fact huge columns lining the "outside," which was simply a tall wide hall built within a cathedral-like crypt. I can believe this is a simple enough mistake to make if he was confused to the point of going all that time without noticing his hands were rotting, even considering the minimal light of his candle. And on that point, without better light he couldn't have possibly seen the tops of these enormous trees in that incredible dark, and he never makes mention of closely examining the trunks. Neither does he expressly state that he has ever visually seen the towers reaching toward the tops of the trees. "Towers" could simply be the name he gave to a number of immense heavenbound passageways he found within his underground structure. If he believed he was in a castle at ground level then of course he would assume they were towers.

I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognised the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognised, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.

I like this sentence because it seems to be summing up his little world. He screwed up. He gave incorrect descriptions to things he found within his immense grave. At this point the veil has been lifted and he is seeing everything for what it really is. The castle was not a castle, the trees were not trees, and he is not what he thought he was.

[Genus Unknown]

I like the idea that the "trees" were columns in some kind of sepulchral structure, but who builds a massive tomb like that underground, underneath the regular graveyard?

Me, I treat this story like, say, "Nyarlathotep," or maybe one of the dream stories. It certainly operates on dream-logic. The plot, with all its holes, isn't terribly important; it's just pure gothic aesthetic.  If it were meant to make a lot of sense on a plot level, it probably wouldn't have all that crazy business at the end about ghouls and the catacombs of Nephren-Ka. 

Compare it to "The White Ship." In "The White Ship," there's a kind of vague overarching plot, but it's fantastic and nonsensical, and is really there to serve as a delivery method for a lot of surreal imagery and musings on things like, say, loneliness, which is a major theme in both stories.  "The Outsider" is much the same way - we have a desperately lonely and pathetic protagonist, a lot of strange images (gothic in this case rather than, you know, moon-beamy, but still fantastic and hard to reconcile with anything in the real world), and a quest for greener pastures that ends in horror and disappointment.  The overall narrative - a man who doesn't know he's dead, returning from the grave and learning the patented Lovecraftian horrible truth - is about as basic as that of "The White Ship," and serves the same purpose: to let Lovecraft (and the reader) play with poetry and imagery, and to illustrate the pain of loneliness and alienation, and the dangers of seeking to alleviate it.  They're essentially the same horribly pessimistic story in different clothes.

[Kaelestes]

I like the idea that the "trees" were columns in some kind of sepulchral structure, but who builds a massive tomb like that underground, underneath the regular graveyard?

According to Tomb Raider these structures are absolutely everywhere.....



Ok, seriously though, how about the Vatican? St. Paul's tomb is literally a church (still standing) that was buried and built over. There's a little underground hill and everything down there. It's not on the scale of Mr. Other's epic tomb, for that kind of hugeness you've got to go to the Parisian sewers or the craziness in greater Italy's crypts, but that kind of thing does exist. The Mayans and Incans too used to build new pyramids over the tops of their older structures. One such pyramid had something like 5-7 layers if memory serves.

[Dirty Cake]

Contrary to popular opinion, "The Outsider" has always been one of my favorites in the Lovecraft canon.

Yes, it is obviously influenced by Lovecraft's love of E.A. Poe, almost to the point of mimicry, but there is something special about this tale.  

For me, it's not that the story doesn't make sense or that it takes itself too literally at times, but rather the mood that it creates while reading it.  There is a very real moment for the reader, at the end of the story, when those italicized words appear - "This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass."

Alot has been said about the "realism" in this story, but I don't see how that really matters in context with all of the other stories Lovecraft has written.  On one hand, he often roots his stories in reality by using real names, places and events, but it only takes a quick read through something like "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" to know that Lovecraft's stories can slide into the ridiculous at times.

I say take it for what it is - a short, but fun (for the reader) tale of sadness, lonliness and horror that Lovecraft would become much better at telling as time went by.

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

For me, this story has the perfect dream feel to it. It resonates very much with how I feel in my own dreams...the sense of familiarity, places and things I've known for a long time and yet the alienness. I couldn't read it literally, but I can enjoy its hazy cast and startling moments of clarity.

[Parallaxicality]

I like the idea that the "trees" were columns in some kind of sepulchral structure, but who builds a massive tomb like that underground, underneath the regular graveyard?

According to Tomb Raider these structures are absolutely everywhere.....

I was going to say, "Every video game designer ever..."

re: sense. Don't get me wrong; I love this story. I think it's a wonderful evocation of the loneliness of the outsider, rotted or not. I just don't think it makes logical sense. And yes, it is dreamlike, but Lovecraft usually makes a fairly sharp distinction between reality and dreamscape.

[old book]

It doesn't make sense in the same way that ghosts wearing clothes don't make sense, or ghosts with horn-rim glasses, or the ghost sound of shod horse hooves on cobbled streets.

[Kirit]

I always took the underground castle to be an abandoned area that had been built over. Like the old city beneath Seattle, and a few others that escape me at the moment. I never had a good explanation for the trees, but columns definitely works. Personally I prefer the interpretation that the castle really is down, there, it's just the narrator is also very unreliable. Kind of like The Quest of Iranon; the places and events are real, but the narrator's perspective is so schewed that it's hard to know if those places even look the way they say they do.

[Gard]

He lived in a massive multi-leveled underground burial chamber which he thought was a castle (as he used to live in one).

This is one of my favorite HPL stories. I want to point out that his last memory (his first undead memory) is of himself looking at his aged (near death) form in the mirror:

"I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of something mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled, and decaying like the castle."

And then his last clear self-image is his monstrous form in the mirror. AWESOME!