The story, “The Outsider”, by H.P Lovecraft, is a highly confusing story that finishes in one of the strangest ways ever in the history of writing. Lovecraft formed a story like this and many more out of the bewildering fears of his imagination as a child. The question is, though, how much can we trust him? The narrator seems to be telling the right thing, but is he unreliable to us as a reader? The only seemingly way to come about answering this question is to analyze this story from an unbiased point-of-view. To start, let’s take a look at what kind of person we readers are dealing with.
The first piece evidence in understanding who the narrator is can be located at the beginning of the story surprisingly. The narrator speaks about how he has a troubling time trying to figure out who he is and his memories of being born. He also continues on saying that the events that happened to him in the story happened when he was a young child. The author states, quote by quote, that, “And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.” This textual evidence definitively proves that the narrator was young when this happened and that now that when he is telling us this story, that he can barely remember his youth years. Moving on in the…show more content… In other words, he taught himself all of those years. What seems very puzzling in this story is the fact that the narrator can write words like “aspect” and “ornate” even though he has been on his own for years. It just doesn’t seem that this narrator is very trustworthy to us the reader, and it seems very much like he may be lying to us. There is one more piece of evidence in the story that can be used against the narrator, and it may be the best evidence we’ve
