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,
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,