Short story project

I decided to do my short story project on a story called Dagon by H.P. Lovecraft.
1. The character begins the story by telling us that the day he is writing this story is the last day of his life. He has been driven mad by what he saw and experienced and became a morphine addict in an effort to ease his madness.
He starts the story by telling us that he was held prisoner aboard a German man o war, the security was lax so he was able to escape on a small lifeboat with some food and fresh water. He was stranded and saw no land or even any sign of land for a few days. One day he woke up and was in a large black mire, his boat a small distance off, with no sign of water in any direction. This strange black mire gave him some vague sense of horror he could not place. That night he slept in his boat.
The next day he notices a portion of land that is slightly taller than the rest of the land surrounding it and decides to walk toward it. He walks for a few days, at which point the ground has hardened and once he reached the hummock he realizes it is much larger than he realizes. Too tired to climb the large hill he camps at the base of it. His dreams are very wild that night and when he wakes from them he decides to sleep no more. Realizing that it is much easier to travel at night he ascends the hill at the top of the hill there is a very large valley and he can see nothing inside the trench. As the moon rises higher into the air he notices that the climb down the valley wall is not at all as bad as it originally looked.
He descends one side of the valley once he gets to a smaller slope he sees a large white monolith. There is a body of water at the bottom of the chasm that separates him from the pillar. He observes the pillar from across the water and notices a system of hieroglyphics he has never seen, based on sea creatures, some known to man and others not known. He also notices extremely large carvings of creatures which look like a cross between a man and a fish, this sight is one of the most horrifying things he has ever seen.
Something then slides out of the water, the thing is very large and he describes it like the Cyclops from the odyssey. This is the point at which he believes he went mad. Only half conscious he travels back to his boat and somehow gets to the ocean. The next thing he remembers is waking up in a san-Francisco hospital. Now he sees the vast thing when the moon is large in the sky, he tried morphine but instead of helping him it only drew him in as a "hopeless slave" and at this point in the story decides to kill himself.

I enjoyed this story, as I do most Lovecraft stories but his relative inexperience at writing shows. This was one of the first fiction stories he wrote as an adult and the extremely basic plot does exemplify that fact. The main character arrives in a vast desert of black muck, travels to a hill, descends a cliff, sees some scary creature, goes mad, runs back to his boat, somehow gets to water that he does not know the location of, and arrives at a hospital. Lovecraft doesn't describe things in extreme detail, instead saying they were terrifying in a way completely indescribable, leaving things to the imagination.


2.There is really only one character in this story, and since he is writing from the first person you never learn his name because he is always speaking of himself in the first person. This character does not do too awfully much to describe his character, he is curious enough to descend a cliff and walk for days to get to a high point of land but other than that his personality traits are not divulged much because there is no appreciable interaction between the main character and other humans in the story. He is obviously a slightly learned man because he knows of the fish god, Dagon and this quote, "the writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me and unlike anything I had seen in books" inferring that he knows something about hieroglyphs and reads some amount of anthropological material. The portion of the story in which he is mad is too short to gain any appreciable evidence of personality traits when he is in human society.


3. The author uses indirect characterization because the story is in the first person and people usually don't describe themselves at the beginning of a story they are writing about themselves. As I said in the previous entry he is curious as shown by this quote, "dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of a scientist's or archeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely." this shows that even though he is frightened he still proceeds because his curiosity gets the better of him. He is also a smart man as is shown by his inferred interest in hieroglyphics and slight knowledge of the Piltdown man which was uncovered as a hoax after the writing of the story.

4.
simile: a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds using as or like

metaphor: a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity

personification: the attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects, animals, and forces of nature

allusion: passing reference or indirect mention

hyperbole: a deliberate exaggeration or overstatement

irony: incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs


5. " Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness." this is an allusion to the story paradise lost.

"Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith." this is a simile, describing the large beast like a monster only seen in dreams. It is also an allusion to Polyphemus, the Cyclops from the odyssey.