Prejudice And Racism Exposed In Lovecraft's Works

Reading Lovecraft´s stories one can clearly see that he generally grew as a writer and went through some developments, though not all of them were consistent and perse-vered through all the stories he wrote in this period, let alone his life.
Most of his earlier stories, like e.g. “The Alchemist”, “The Tomb”, ”The Nameless City”, “The Outsider”, had a baroque, Poe-esque atmosphere, his inspirations were rather obvi-ous (cf. Burleson, 1983, 53). The narrator of those stories is almost always a first-person narrator and also the protagonist of them and the place as well as the origin of fear are mostly “worldly” (e.g. “The Outsider”, (cf. Burleson, 1990, 55-56)), although he also al-ready wrote some stories with horror due to extraterrestrial …show more content…
The most notable of those is his relationship towards racism; while he lived with his then-wife in New York he started to slowly hate different people, people with-out a Anglo-Saxon descend, more and more which can be seen in stories like “The Shadow over Innsmouth” or “The Horror at Red Hook”, but this hate lessened after moving from New York (cf. Houllebecq, 107-9). He also started to make the objects of fear in his stories bigger, wider-reaching with creations like “Cthulhu” from “The Call of Cthulhu” (cf. Burleson, 1990, 77-8), his other gods and the general lore of his universe to showcase the relative irrelevance of humans in it (cf. Zachrau, 130). Another im-portant change in his writing style was that he began to tell some of his stories via a third-person narrator, but the narrator was still personally present in the story; he just wasn´t always the protagonist anymore (e.g. “The Colour out of Space” (cf. Burleson, 1983, 136-7)). Although the stories from this period of his life and until his death were still inspired by authors like Poe, his general ideas as well as his universe are mostly unique and the unknown is still the cause of the fear he creates (cf. Zachrau,