The Call of Cthulhu

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1928

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Literary Devices

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Literary Devices

First-Person Point of View

“The Call of Cthulhu” is written in the first-person point of view. This technique is common in horror writing as it easily permits the author—and narrator—to withhold information from the reader. In “The Call of Cthulhu,” Thurston knows the whole story from the beginning, but he reveals it to us piece by piece. In theory, Thurston does this to prove that his investigation was thorough, orderly, and reasonable. In practice, it allows Lovecraft to create a sense of mounting horror as the truth about Cthulhu comes into focus.

The first-person point of view also allows the reader to “see past” Thurston. While Thurston is too skeptical to believe in Wilcox’s ramblings or Old Castro’s account of the cult’s beliefs, the reader recognizes that Thurston is overlooking important information. While Thurston describes his emotional reactions in detail—especially his mounting horror the more he learns about the cult—he fails to see how these emotions affect his judgment. We anticipate that Thurston is stumbling into greater danger than he realizes, raising the story’s tension.

The first-person point of view has a drawback in that other characters’ voices and stories are filtered through the narrator’s own. Angell, Wilcox, Legrasse, Johansen, and even Old Castro have personal accounts of their experience with Cthulhu. Lovecraft provides documentary evidence, so to speak, for each of these sources to prove their authenticity, but the reader still learns of them from Thurston. The accounts by others are filtered through his emotions, deteriorating mental state, and skepticism, such that the reader cannot be entirely sure of what they said. This uncertainty is appropriate for a story that is ultimately about humans’ inability to understand cosmic truth, and it leaves the reader with lingering questions that contribute to the feeling of eeriness after the story has ended.

Foreshadowing and Ambiguity

“The Call of Cthulhu” uses extensive foreshadowing and ambiguity to raise tension as the narrative progresses. At the story’s end, we learn that Thurston expects to be murdered by the Cthulhu cultists, and this ending is foreshadowed in the suspicious deaths of Johansen and Angell. Angell’s murder is hinted at early on. When the professor is first introduced, we learn that he died from “some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end” (160). Thurston initially believes this account, but as his investigation continues, he is “inclined to wonder—and more than wonder” (161).

The ambiguity relies on the reader’s ability to read between the lines of Thurston’s account. It is interesting, for example, that Legrasse, who also knows a good deal of information about the cult, has not been killed, especially as he was directly responsible for the death and imprisonment of cult members. He and his team discovered the cult’s meeting place and, perhaps more than the others, pose a direct threat to the cult’s survival. His survival casts doubt on Thurston’s belief that he and the others are targets.

Another point of narrative ambiguity is that Thurston’s evidence for murder is extremely circumstantial; his uncle was jostled by a “negro” sailor while ascending a steep hill (160), and Johansen was killed “during a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down” (173). Both of these deaths are unusual, but not conclusive of a conspiracy. Readers must judge for themselves how much credence they give Thurston’s interpretation.

The final and most effective example of foreshadowing is Cthulhu’s appearance in the story’s climactic scene. We are first introduced to the figure of Cthulhu in Wilcox’s clay tablet, an impressionistic artwork inspired by a dream. At this point in the story, Cthulhu’s existence is only speculative. Later, its image gains detail as Thurston encounters other representations of the creature. Cthulhu comes into focus as the story progresses, first in artwork (the statuettes) and then in first-hand accounts, making his final appearance in the “flesh” seem inevitable.

The ambiguous counterpoint to this foreshadowing is that, for all Thurston’s research into the Cthulhu Cult, he never has a direct encounter with Cthulhu, either in the flesh or in his dreams. Nor does he encounter individuals who are associated with the cult. His search is intensely personal, even though it began with dispassionate curiosity. The reader must wonder how much of Thurston’s anxiety is self-produced rather than the result of a legitimate threat to his life.

Dramatic Irony

There are several moments in the story when Lovecraft raises the tension by letting the reader see something Thurston cannot. For example, when Old Castro describes the Cthulhu Cult’s beliefs, Thurston dismisses them as “madness” or superstition or both—but the reader suspects that there is more to Old Castro’s tale. Similarly, Thurston insists that Wilcox’s dream is a kind of ploy, but he tells us enough about Wilcox’s character that we recognize this as unlikely.

The greatest example of dramatic irony lies in the story’s subtitle: “Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston” (159). This phrase could be read as meaning that Thurston’s fear about his imminent death at the hands of the Cthulhu Cult came to fruition. Just as he became the executor of his uncle’s estate and found his research on the cult, so must someone else have found Thurston’s notes.

Lovecraft heightens the irony by leaving questions for the reader: Were Thurston’s writings made public? Who found the papers and presented them in their current form? Did the cultists cause Thurston’s death as he believed they would, or did he die later in life from natural causes? The mystery of Thurston’s death hangs over the story. It provides the apex of dramatic irony because the reader knows something that the narrator cannot know—that he is dead.