Carter and Warren used to study forbidden books without abandon – “ Most, I believe, are in Arabic,” he explains, helping to build that famous connection between the Orient and the supernatural – but now the character shows signs of regret regarding his past actions. The subject of his tale is his colleague, Harley Warren, and the time they went to a swamp together. They are of “nebulous nature” the creatures that appear are referred to as “nameless things” and the events themselves feel like a “vision” or a “nightmare.”Ĭarter tries to justify this language, saying that “ if anything remains vague it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind.” In other words, the horrors here are indescribable not only because of their strange nature, which defies language, but also because they left an impression on the narrator, a lasting effect, making him dazed and uncertain. Randolph Carter speaks just like the other Lovecraftian narrators, describing those horrors with vague terms. It’s as if they’re pleading with us to consider the horrors that they’re going to describe possible so as to amplify their effect. There’s a need for these narrators to establish themselves as reliable ones because the events that are going to follow are too fantastical in nature. The Statement of Randolph Carter begins, like many other stories written by Lovecraft, with a narrator claiming that his tale is governed by reason and contains nothing but the truth. Narrated in the first person, the story has Randolph Carter giving the police his statement about the events that led to the death of his colleague, Harley Warren. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a short story about the price those who search for forbidden knowledge must pay. “ I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless.”

The point is to analyze how Lovecraft crafted his tales of horror, the narrative devices he used, the patterns in his writing, the common themes present in his work, and – of course – the blatant racism that permeates some of his stories. Lovecraft’s short stories and novellas, following a chronological order – as they are structured in the Barnes & Noble edition of H.P. The plan is to write a few paragraphs – a small review – on each of H.P. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, and more powerful beings.

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