The Unnamable (short story)
| "The Unnamable" | |
|---|---|
| Author | H.P. Lovecraft |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror |
| Published in | Weird Tales |
| Publication date | 1925 |
"The Unnamable" is a horror short story by American author H. P. Lovecraft. It was written in September 1923 and was first published in the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales.
Carter, a weird fiction writer, meets with his close friend, Joel Manton, in a cemetery near an old, dilapidated house on Meadow Hill in the town of Arkham, Massachusetts. As the two sit upon a weathered tomb, Carter tells Manton the tale of an indescribable entity that allegedly haunts the house and surrounding area. He contends that because such an entity cannot be perceived by the five senses, it becomes impossible to quantify and accurately describe, thus earning itself the term unnamable.
As the narration closes, this unnamable presence attacks both Carter and Manton. Both men survive and awaken later at St. Mary’s hospital. They suffer from various lacerations, including scarring from a large horn-shaped object and bruises in the shape of hoof-prints on their backs.
Manton describes the unnamable in the closing passage of the story:
It was everywhere — a gelatin — a slime — yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes — and a blemish. It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!
Carter is usually identified with Randolph Carter, a recurring, autobiographical character in Lovecraft's fiction. The incident in "The Unnamable" is alluded to in "The Silver Key" (1926), which records that Carter "went back to Arkham...and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows, and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor." However, the Carter of "The Unnamable" does not believe in the supernatural, which would conflict with the supernatural events of "The Statement of Randolph Carter." The Carter of this story also seems to be a reflection of Lovecraft himself, as shown when: "he added, my constant talk about 'unnamable' and 'unmentionable' things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced." This is quite in standing with Lovecraft's work up to this point in his career, much of which uses similar plot devices to those described, such as entities beyond comprehension and protagonists driven mad by their experiences.
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