The Call of Cthulhu Essay Questions

Lovecraft is frequently criticized by modern readers for his racist imagery and characterization which, while common at the time Lovecraft wrote it, is offensive in the modern day. Explain how Lovecraft used stereotypes of his time about race and ethnicity to contribute to the settings and the plot of "The Call of Cthulhu."

The narrator of the story, an educated upper-class American of European descent named Francis Wayland Thurston, is sorting through accounts left by other men of his class and ethnicity. These include his great-uncle, a linguistics professor with an extensive education and a great deal of social status. Other narrators include a police inspector named Legrasse and Gustaf Johansen, a mariner from a Nordic country who is only a second mate but who is educated enough to sail the ship back home almost singlehandedly and to write a detailed account of his adventure.

One of the ways Lovecraft attempts to provoke fear in the reader is by leveraging off a common fear of the "other" and of the uncontrollable and knowable. By making the antagonists and Cthulhu worshippers come from wild, untamed parts of the world and from races and ethnicities that differed from the narrator, Lovecraft provides an explanation for some of the narrator's fear and revulsion. He also co-opts a contemporary stereotype of people from indigenous and non-European cultures as being intellectually, morally, and spiritually inferior to Europeans despite being more numerous.

Explain how Lovecraft's use of secondary narrators contributes to the pacing and the gradual unfolding of the otherwise simple plot.

The secondary narrators in the novel include Inspector Legrasse, a police officer in Louisiana, and Gustaf Johansen, a second mate on a steam ship. Each man (there are no significant female characters in the story) lives in a different part of the world and observes only part of the action. Only the narrator, who interviews each man separately (or reads the manuscript he left behind prior to his untimely death), has all the facts. The secondary narration allows a contrast to emerge between the narrator's sense of urgency and the slow pace at which the story develops. Emphasizing the trauma to the characters who are relating horrific events, and showing the effect of the Cthulhu cult on those individuals, allows Lovecraft to build tension and suspense.

Compare and contrast the characters of Inspector Legrasse and Johansen.

Both Legrasse and Johansen are men of action. They are educated but not to the refined level of the narrator or any of the academics who attempt to study the Cthulhu artifacts. Legrasse, a police inspector, is responsible for enforcing the law. Johansen, the second mate on a two-masted schooner, has a great deal of practical knowledge of seamanship and navigation. Both Legrasse and Johansen have negative experiences with the Cthulhu cult members: Legrasse finds evidence of a horrific mass ritual that included human sacrifice, and Johansen was part of a crew on a two-masted schooner that was attacked by members of the Cthulhu cult on another vessel. Legrasse and Johansen differ in terms of their approach to the problem. Whereas Legrasse seeks out the help of other people to solve the mystery, inviting learned men including Angell to study the Cthulhu statue and to attempt to interpret the writing, Johansen flees to Oslo, surviving only long enough to write an account of his experience.

The "Old Gods," and Cthulhu in particular, are horrifying because they transcend what human beings understand as reality. How does Lovecraft attempt to describe their trans-dimensional nature? Provide examples.

The inscription on Cthulhu's statue, and the words used in the prayers of the Cthulhu cult members, do not belong to any human language. The type of stone used to make the Cthulhu carving does not come from any known type of rock found on Earth. When the dead city of R'lyeh rises from the ocean and takes the form of an uncharted island, the buildings of the city are "Cyclopean," or impossibly huge and out of proportion to the human explorers. Furthermore, there is a kind of spatial distortion: the geometry of R'lyeh appears to not follow any Euclidean laws: triangles might have more than a hundred and eighty degrees, straight lines appear to curve, and surfaces might seem convex to the eye but concave to the touch and vice versa. Finally, Cthulhu is not described in detail or seen in its entirety, but the horrific appearance is conveyed by Johansen's reaction.

What is the significance of the story's subtitle, "From the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston"?

The story's subtitle reveals to the reader, even before he or she has begun reading the story proper, that Francis Wayland Thurston is deceased. This adds a layer of irony to reading the story, given that, in the narration itself, Thurston nervously contemplates at various moments the possibility that he will meet a similar end to those of his grand-uncle and Gustaf Johansen, who died under mysterious circumstances. Thurston was not able to escape the curse of the Cthulhu cult, and uses the last line of the story to beg his executors not to let the story reach any other human eyes. Thus, the implication is that the reader is now the bearer of the Cthulhu cult curse that has already claimed many lives.