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 even a superficial reading of his published...