An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

On the level of plot, “The Outsider” makes little sense and in fact reads as if a transcription of a dream. It appears, from the Outsider’s various remarks regarding his puzzlement at the present shape of the ivied castle he enters, that he is some long-dead ancestor of the current occupants of the castle. His emergence in the topmost tower of his underground castle places him in a room containing “vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size”—clearly the mausoleum of the castle on the surface. Even if the Outsider is some centuried ancestor, there is no explanation for how he has managed to survive—or rise from the dead—after all this time. Whether that castle exists in reality (in which case it is difficult to imagine how it could have an “endless forest” surrounding it) or is merely a product of the Outsider’s imagination is left unclear. Many commentators have attempted to speculate on a literary influence for the concluding image of the Outsider’s touching the mirror and seeing himself. Colin Wilson ( The Strength to Dream,1961) has suggested both Poe’s classic story of a double, “William Wilson,” and also Wilde’s fairy tale “The Birthday of the Infanta,” in which a twelve-year-old princess is initially described as “the most graceful of all and the most tastefully attired” but proves to be “a monster, the most grotesque monster he had ever beheld. Not properly shaped as all other people were, but hunchbacked, and crooked-limbed, with huge lolling head and a mane of black hair.” George T.Wetzel (“The Cthulhu Mythos: A Study,” in FDOC) has put forth Hawthorne’s curious sketch, “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” in which a man dreams that he is walking down Broadway in a shroud, only discovering the fact by seeing himself in a shop window. There is also a celebrated passage in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1818) in which the monster sees his own reflection for the first time in a pool of water. This influence seems more likely in view of the fact that the earlier scene, where the Outsider disturbs the party by stepping through the window, may also have been derived from Frankenstein:“‘One of the best of [the cottages] I entered, but I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted.’”

Preeminently, however, the story is a homage to Poe. August Derleth maintained that “The Outsider” could pass as a lost tale of Poe’s; but HPL’s own later judgment, expressed in a 1931 letter to J.Vernon Shea, seems more accurate: “Others…agree with you in liking ‘The Outsider’, but I can’t say that I share this opinion. To my mind this tale—written a decade ago—is too glibly mechanicalin its climactic effect, & almost comic in the bombastic pomposity of its language. As I re-read it, I can hardly understand how I could have let myself be tangled up in such baroque & windy rhetoric as recently as ten years ago. It represents my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height” ( SL3.379). Specifically, the tale’s opening paragraphs closely echo the opening

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of “Berenice,” while the scene in the brilliantly lit castle brings to mind the lavish party scene in “The Masque of the Red Death.”

In 1934 HPL provided an interesting sidelight into the composition of the story. As recollected by R.H.Barlow, HPL stated: “‘The Outsider’ [is] a series of climaxes—originally intended to cease with the graveyard episode; then he wondered what would happen if people would see the ghoul; and so included the second climax; finally he decided to have the Thing see itself!”