Short Story Criticism | Lovecraft, H. P. - Dirk W. Mosig (essay date 1987)

Dirk W. Mosig (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Mosig, Dirk W. “The Four Faces of the Outsider.” In Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 18–41. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Mosig investigates the “message” in the story “The Outsider,” based on four methods of interpretation: the autobiographical, the psychological, the metaphysical, and the philosophical.]

H. P. Lovecraft did not write to entertain, nor did he tailor his impressive fiction with the paying market in mind. Instead, he relied on his work as a revisionist or ghost-writer, and on the meager proceedings of the rapidly vanishing Philips estate, for the small but regular income which allowed him to lead a frugal existence. When Lovecraft turned his encyclopedic mind to the careful craftsmanship of one of his memorable tales, he did so to attain a measure of artistic self-expression. As becomes obvious from...

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