Wednesday, October 13, 2010

What the Moon Brings

After reading Lovecraft’s What the Moon Brings I was more confused than anything else. The dreamy abstract way the story is written makes it very hard to distinguish between what is meant to be taken literally and what is meant to be taken figuratively. There is very little initial setup of plot or character; we don’t know who the protagonist is, where he is specifically, or what he is doing there. The only information available are the little tidbits of information described amid Lovecraft’s long, surreal descriptions of mood and scenery.
While this makes reading What the Moon Brings difficult, it also helps heighten the feeling of suspense that the story gives. Because we don’t know exactly what’s going on, we don’t know exactly where the story’s going and so every advancement of the plot comes as a surprise. References are made to a garden, a stream, and later a sea, and a “city of the dead.” It’s not clear if the story’s protagonist really sees these things or if they are all part of some sort of fantastic allegory. It’s not until the very end when the protagonist glimpses the horrible monster rising from the see and throws himself into the city that we can really be sure anything is actually happening.
As a story, I didn’t enjoy What the Moon Brings very much, however, the writing was fun by itself. It would be very difficult and probably incredibly frustrating to read more than a few pages of any story written this way, however it would be interesting to see this surreal style of writing used for poetry or some other more abstract literary art form.
I also enjoyed Lovecraft’s surreal descriptions; even if they weren’t particularly helpful in grounding me within the scene, they were interesting to read, and really set the mood of the story. Hearing these verbally narrated would be an interesting experience simply because the voice of narrator would have such a huge effect on how the descriptions were perceived by the audience. I imagine it would feel similar to listening to a dictation of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe: creepy but satisfying.

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