by Gene Michael Stover
created Monday, 2026 January 5
updated Monday, 2026 January 5
original at cybertiggyr.com/dvpsdbt.html
“The Outsider” is a story written by H.P. Lovecraft.
It's the first Lovecraft story I read. (I was in 4th grade. It was a rainy day at school. At recess, I went into the library & picked up a magazine almost at random. I read the shortest story in it.)
I assume you have read it, too.
My interpretation of the story differs from any other I've seen. Here it is.
The narrator is a re-animated corpse because the funerary rights on a previously living person's body actually worked, but not the way the funerary practitioners imagined. Instead of preparing the body for the afterlife as a new & improved version of the formerly living person, a new consciousness emerged with no memory of the previous life.
I’m not claiming this is definitive, but it is consistent with the text, & I think it's creepier than the more common interpretations I've seen.
The narrator describes their location as an infinitely old & horrible castle. The ceilings are high & feature cobwebs & shadows. the stones are crumbling & wet. There's a pervasive smell “as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations”. It's always dark, so the narrator sometimes lights candles.
It's also always dark outside. The narrator has never seen the sky. The narrator says it's due to the thick tree cover, but by the end of the story, we know it's because they are underground.
The narrator concludes that they are in a castle, but what if, though their description is accurate, their conclusion is not. What if they are in a vast tomb or a necropolis?
The narrator doesn't have memories of a childhood like most of us do. They say “beings must have cared for my needs” and “whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of somebody mockingly like myself”. Note that, having finished the story, we know the narrator is a ghoul or like a rotting corpse.
Most (maybe all) cultures have funerary practices, from the sterile & semi-medical such as our morticians to the elaborate such as in ancient Egypt. They prepare a body for a post-mortem existence (even if that existence is ashes).
The narrator could have been a living person who died. That body was prepared for its post-mortem existence. If the civilization believed in a literal afterlife, such as the ancient Egyptians did (or at least many westerners of Lovecraft's time believed), they may have expected the body to be resurrected, improved, better than new for an active life inhabited by the (also improved) spirit of the formerly living person.
Little did they realize that their funerary practices did reanimate the body with a new consciousness. The process was slow, so though that new consciousness had a bare awareness of the funerary procedures as they happened, the body appeared dead until long after it was entombed.
The barely-reanimated body was placed in the formerly living person's tomb. Since the tomb is so elaborate (at least big enough to appear to be a castle with a dense forest around it), I'm guessing the formerly living person was a royal person.
In the penultimate paragraph, the narrator says that they “play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed & unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile”.
When the narrator describes the terrifying creature they see, before they realized they were looking into a mirror, they mention that it's decaying so thoroughly that its outlines reveal bones. They also mention that the clothes are decaying. Sounds like a long-buried corpse.