“With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos...” (From Beyond). Howard Phillips Lovecraft first authored these words in November of 1920 in the short story From Beyond, words that would come to resound throughout the rest of his writing career centered around his “weird fiction”. Lovecraft’s influence on the genre of horror would end up being comparable only to Edgar Allan Poe. The Cthulhu Mythos, the most famous of his creations, would contain stories that showed humanity to be mere pawns, if that, to forces greater than our own in the universe - forces which could care less about what happens to the human species. H.P. Lovecraft, though, wasn’t just a horror writer - a few of his themes maintain similarity
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When he visits, Tillinghast looks nothing like he did before, his servants are mysteriously gone, and the protagonist feels strangely uncomfortable in the house. Upon activating the machine, the protagonist begins to see not only normally invisible things, like ultraviolet light, but also strange creatures permeating the air and discovers that the servants were killed by something that exists in this greater reality that Tillinghast calls “beyond”. The greatest challenge to the protagonist’s notions of reality is delivered in a more basic line, which in many ways is made much more powerful because of that: “At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body” (From Beyond). The very foundations of what he thinks is basic reality - the fact that his body is solid and things can’t pass through it easily - is outright defied by this one experience. Ironically, it is the modern writer Franz Kafka that immediately starts off The Metamorphosis by having the protagonist Gregor Samsa questioning of reality when: “One morning, …show more content…
What we believe happened in the past may not have been what actually occurred, and both Lovecraft and Kafka take on this truth with respect to reality itself in their stories. In From Beyond, we first see an inkling that Tillinghast’s machine might not be what he claims it to be in the line: “I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished” (From Beyond). This line is later supported and countered towards the end of the story, where Lovecraft once more forces us to question the validity of the protagonist’s experience, his reality, when he says: “The doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and homicidal madman... What prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact - that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.” Lovecraft brilliantly leads us in a circle of sorts, a loop where there is evidence on one side to suggest the other is not what happened, but there is just as much on the other side to suggest the contrary. This is a deliberate move on Lovecraft’s part; he is trying to show us the questionable nature of reality itself, and how for even the same person it can become malleable. Whilst Kafka isn’t nearly as fantastical as Lovecraft, he still leads us to question whether Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis has
When he visits, Tillinghast looks nothing like he did before, his servants are mysteriously gone, and the protagonist feels strangely uncomfortable in the house. Upon activating the machine, the protagonist begins to see not only normally invisible things, like ultraviolet light, but also strange creatures permeating the air and discovers that the servants were killed by something that exists in this greater reality that Tillinghast calls “beyond”. The greatest challenge to the protagonist’s notions of reality is delivered in a more basic line, which in many ways is made much more powerful because of that: “At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body” (From Beyond). The very foundations of what he thinks is basic reality - the fact that his body is solid and things can’t pass through it easily - is outright defied by this one experience. Ironically, it is the modern writer Franz Kafka that immediately starts off The Metamorphosis by having the protagonist Gregor Samsa questioning of reality when: “One morning, …show more content…
What we believe happened in the past may not have been what actually occurred, and both Lovecraft and Kafka take on this truth with respect to reality itself in their stories. In From Beyond, we first see an inkling that Tillinghast’s machine might not be what he claims it to be in the line: “I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished” (From Beyond). This line is later supported and countered towards the end of the story, where Lovecraft once more forces us to question the validity of the protagonist’s experience, his reality, when he says: “The doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and homicidal madman... What prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact - that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.” Lovecraft brilliantly leads us in a circle of sorts, a loop where there is evidence on one side to suggest the other is not what happened, but there is just as much on the other side to suggest the contrary. This is a deliberate move on Lovecraft’s part; he is trying to show us the questionable nature of reality itself, and how for even the same person it can become malleable. Whilst Kafka isn’t nearly as fantastical as Lovecraft, he still leads us to question whether Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis has