This week, I read a few of Lovecraft's short stories, taking meticulous notes as I read. I also have my guiding questions more or less established. Some excerpts from my notes of a few of the works I read:
---"The Beast in the Cave" (1905)
-written when Lovecraft was 14
-no actual experience in caves (just went off what he read)
-Mammoth Cave in Kentucky
-p1: "Yet indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanor..."
-darkness of the cave has transformative property
-devolves man into simian creature
-ending implies that narrator could/would have turned into this creature
-the fact that the "Beast" is/was human means that it could happen to anyone
-people can personally relate to this
---"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (1919)
-takes place in the Catskill Mountains near New York
-anticipates some features of "The Shadow out of Time"
-mountain folk = primitive, almost subhuman people
-comparable to "white trash" of the South
-no social or familial structure - no committed relationships
-vague, cosmic, undescribed "oppressor"
---"Memory" (1919)
-inspired by Poe's prose poems - "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"
-also Poe's "The Valley of Unrest" ("the valley of Nis")
-ruins of an unknown civilization
-post-human world
-apes, toads, Genie, and Daemon present
-Man has practically been forgotten
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