Could you imagine how you would feel if you woke up one day to a horrific face staring right at you? You would feel an immense amount of terror, and you would probably become paralyzed with fear. A similar sense of dread can be felt when reading “The Outsider”, written by H.P. Lovecraft. The author uses a variety of descriptive words so that reader can get an understanding of what the main character is feeling. Lovecraft begins this story with a dreary tone, along with an unsettling mood. The atmosphere itself becomes a character, and the life of the protagonist depends on himself.
Immediately, H.P. Lovecraft sets both the tone and the mood as bleak and dismal by exploring the dark side of humanity. He starts off the story with, “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal …show more content…
Him living or dying depends on his ability to make it out of the castle alive. In order to escape the castle, he must climb out of an unstable tower. He knows how extremely risky the task is. He states, “And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding a day” (Lovecraft). It would seem the main character would risk anything just to see the sky for himself, even if it meant falling to his own death. He also has to come to terms with whatever is, or will be, occurring. The man may not understand it himself, but if he wants to continue on with his journey, he must accept that facts as they are, no matter how confusing. When he made it to the house, everyone cried out when they saw him, but he didn’t understand why. The only thing he knew was that he was an outsider in that environment, and he accepted it. At the end of the story, he was alive and well, and he accepted whatever was going on with