The Colour Out Of Space Analysis

In “The Colour out of Space” the first-person narrator arrives at a place described as “West Arkham” where he discovers five acres desolated and covered in ash and dust. There he asks an old man nearby, Ammi Pierce, what had happened there. From then on the narrator retells what Ammi tells him. Back in his earlier days there lived a family, the Gardners, on the farm there and Ammi was a close friend of the father, Nahum. Then someday a meteor fell onto their property close to their well and was examined which yielded in the result that the substance that meteor is made of is completely unknown to mankind. After some time the meteor shrank away, but it still affected the Gardners. Their next harvest was an utter disappointment and their animals …show more content…
The narrator of this story and his other more mature stories is a rather passive one. Here he is a surveyor, a reteller of a story he has been told and he also seems to act fairly normal and does not suffer from any obvious condition which gives him more credibility and a sense of realism unlike the narrator in e.g. “The Outsider”. The motive of the story is also more direct and complex at the same time compared to e.g. “The Outsider”, the creeping decay of the Gardners (and maybe even the whole world) which is already clear relatively early on creates much more and better tension which is also relieved in a better point of climax, the sudden ´vanishing´. He also uses a more poetic language than earlier on which can be already seen in his use of chiasmus in the narrators comment on seeing the “blasted heath” after only hearing the name before: “[F]or no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this particular region” (Lovecraft, 2014, 638). (Burleson, 1983,