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Originally Posted by BeerClark  If someone knows of something from Lovecraft himself that explains this further, it would be interesting to hear.Mike |
That's a good reading of it I'd say, Mike. There's a lot more to the story (as there is with so much of his work)... ways in which he used his stories to parody various things, make social commentary, etc., without stepping outside the story (normally). As for Lovecraft's own statements about this tale, the relevant passages can be found in Selected Letters, vol. I: pp. 152 (where he simply mentions having George Julian Houtain having talked him into doing "a series of ghastly tales to order -- apparently unaware that art cannot be created to order"); 154; 157-58; 166 (sans mention of title), 179, 188-89 (sans title); 201; and vol. IV, p. 381; Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, pp. 221, 224. None of these actually address the points you made about the ending, but rather his dismay at the constrictions he was working under, and which (given Lovecraft's personality) had something of the effect of a straitjacket on his creativity.
Nonetheless, he did manage to put some very good things in there... it's just that the stories themselves suffer greatly from his having to curb his own imagination to fit certain preconceptions....
Oh, and a long-overdue reply to Steve: yes, the different parts do indeed have titles of their own: Chapter I is "From the Dark"; Chapter II, "The Plague-Daemon"; Chapter III, "Six Shots by Moonlight" (and yes, that particular image is certainly... ummmmm... of dubious taste by today's standards
); Chapter IV, "The Scream of the Dead"; Chapter V, "The Horror from the Shadows"; Chapter VI, "The Tomb-Legions".
One thing that, I'd say, has to do with one aspect of the ending -- West's passivity, etc. -- was the fact that HPL always wanted his tales to have that feeling of the inevitability of a nightmare, where the dreamer is impotent to avert what is coming... they often know (or suspect) what is in store, but such knowledge seldom -- if ever -- allows them to change the course of events. This had a lot to do with his view of determinism, I think....