Lovecraft's Anxiety In 'The Call Of Cthulhu'
In H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, Lovecraft uses supernatural figures, monsters, in order to express his own anxiety and fear. In “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft created nameless narrators who were filled with their own fear and anxiety. Furthermore, at the end of their stories, they can’t escape what they fear. Trying to escape what they fear, the nameless narrator's discover at the end of the stories that they turn into what they fear and accept their fate. Finally, Lovecraft expresses his anxieties in these two stories through genetics, the cosmic fear, and an xenophobia tension throughout the nameless narrator’s experiences and Lovecraft’s own experiences.
Lovecraft suffers with genetic anxiety due to the mental …show more content…
The cosmic fear, the all-knowing, is highly shown towards the end of Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu.” As the nameless narrator discovers his uncle’s manuscripts, he decides to investigate further along. As he reads through these manuscripts, he stumbles upon his uncle’s patients who suffered from recurring nightmares involving sea-like monsters. Stated by the narrator, “I know too much… if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put cation before audacity and see that it meet no other eye” (Lovecraft 169). Here, the narrator anxiously questions whether or not he will have these nightmares of the Cthulhu monster. Stated at the end of the story, the nameless narrator seemed to have suffer anxiously about his fear of knowing too much. The narrator also states, “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went...so I shall go” (Lovecraft 169). Though he does develop a fear of the psychological experiences the men went through, he fears the idea of knowing too much information as well as accepting his own death. Much like Lovecraft, it can be argued that knowing too much of his parents psychological issues and further investigating in this supernatural-horror fiction, Lovecraft himself has this anxious fear of the all-knowing cosmos. Stated in his biography in the introduction of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, S.T Joshi states, “Lovecraft’s philosophical position virtually necessitated the central conception in his aesthetic of the weird⎯ the notion of cosmicism, or the suggestion of the vast gulfs of scape and time and the resultant inconsequence of the human species” ( xv Joshi). Joshi states that “the notion of cosmicism” is considered a lack to the human species according to
Lovecraft suffers with genetic anxiety due to the mental …show more content…
The cosmic fear, the all-knowing, is highly shown towards the end of Lovecraft’s story, “The Call of Cthulhu.” As the nameless narrator discovers his uncle’s manuscripts, he decides to investigate further along. As he reads through these manuscripts, he stumbles upon his uncle’s patients who suffered from recurring nightmares involving sea-like monsters. Stated by the narrator, “I know too much… if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put cation before audacity and see that it meet no other eye” (Lovecraft 169). Here, the narrator anxiously questions whether or not he will have these nightmares of the Cthulhu monster. Stated at the end of the story, the nameless narrator seemed to have suffer anxiously about his fear of knowing too much. The narrator also states, “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went...so I shall go” (Lovecraft 169). Though he does develop a fear of the psychological experiences the men went through, he fears the idea of knowing too much information as well as accepting his own death. Much like Lovecraft, it can be argued that knowing too much of his parents psychological issues and further investigating in this supernatural-horror fiction, Lovecraft himself has this anxious fear of the all-knowing cosmos. Stated in his biography in the introduction of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, S.T Joshi states, “Lovecraft’s philosophical position virtually necessitated the central conception in his aesthetic of the weird⎯ the notion of cosmicism, or the suggestion of the vast gulfs of scape and time and the resultant inconsequence of the human species” ( xv Joshi). Joshi states that “the notion of cosmicism” is considered a lack to the human species according to