The Colour Out of Space

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1927

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Literary Devices

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Literary Devices

Passive Narrators and Frame Narration

Lovecraft frequently employs frame narrators and passive narrators to tell a story. In “The Colour Out of Space,” he does both. The story told by the unnamed narrator frames Ammi Pierce’s account of how the blasted heath came to be. Typically, a frame narrator has his own purpose and reason for relating the story, a motive separate from the story itself. In this case, the unnamed surveyor was sent to do a job and became fascinated by the origin of the blasted heath.

Although Ammi is relating the story of Nahum Gardner and the unseeable colour, he is actually recounting his own experience and observations as an actor within the primary narrative. Thus, he can’t properly be called a frame narrator. In addition, he has no external motive of his own, separate from the fact that he has been asked to tell the story.

Both Ammi and the unnamed surveyor are passive narrators. The surveyor doesn’t convey any intention of alerting authorities that the planned reservoir may become tainted, and although he expresses concern for Ammi, he doesn’t try to encourage Ammi to leave. At most, he intends to ask someone to keep an eye on the old man. Ammi appears to have become more passive over the years. During the strange times, he continued to visit Nahum and made an effort to convince Nahum to dig another well but he doesn’t press him beyond that. Since the strange days, Ammi seems to have become trapped in much the same way as Nahum—aware of the creeping menace but unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The passive narrator is essential to a story in which the primary actor comes to a bad end. The bad end is often necessary to illustrate the unwisdom of tampering with forbidden knowledge and forces beyond human control. The telling of the story requires a survivor, but the survivor can’t be the kind of protagonist who would interfere with the primary actor’s necessary downfall.

Thus, many of Lovecraft’s “mad scientists” and occult scholars have a more relatable observer/companion, rather like Holmes’s Watson, who can tell the story and sometimes interpret the actions of the main character.

Conveying Mood Through Setting

Although Lovecraft is always notable for his attention to place, “The Colour Out of Space” incorporates setting more deeply into the overall mood and tone than virtually any other of his work. In the first paragraph, Lovecraft establishes the setting with hills that rise wild—putting the reader alone on a height. He then drops the reader from the heights into a dark narrow glen with trees that slope fantastically, conveying otherworldliness. The description creates a sense of isolation both beautiful and gloomy. The landscape, while not exactly hostile, doesn’t want people. It has driven them away, leaving their ancient farms and cottages to brood eternally. This earthly landscape is a miniature of the outer universe that Lovecraft envisions.

The author describes the blasted heath and the effect of the unseeable colour. The scientists are only able to apply abstract words like, “bizarre optical properties” (28). Another author might try to take a shortcut by showing the characters blinking and rubbing their eyes or stumbling into objects because they have misjudged their distance. Lovecraft, however, finds words to describe the indescribable. In addition to haze and perspective, he mentions chiaroscuro. The effect is of the narrator, accustomed to three dimensions, walking through a disorienting two-dimensional landscape of distorted colors.

In the final scene, as the alien entity is getting ready to depart, Lovecraft transforms the Gardner farmyard into a nightmarish alien landscape of trees writhing and clawing at the sky like sentient things in torment. The animation of the trees is more uncanny than the behavior of the alien colour because we know how trees should behave and these violate that understanding. The colour, while a clear and present danger, is less of a personal insult to the senses.

Finally, we are brought back to where we began with the frame narrator reflecting on the slowly-creeping blight, the probability that there is yet an alien entity poisoning the land around it and an image of fat oaks that shine in the dark and move their branches without wind.

Voice and Style

Lovecraft is both beloved and mocked—depending on the taste of the reader—for his use of language. His devotees love words that evoke mood or imagery or which, by their obscurity or archaism, create a sense of the strange and mysterious. On the other hand, the pulp magazines, especially Weird Tales, were his bread and butter, and the editors of those magazines tended to rein back Lovecraft’s style when they judged it too literary for their audience. Later in his career, Lovecraft expressed dissatisfaction. He felt that the pulp editors had ruined him for anything of more literary merit. However, by the time he wrote “The Colour Out of Space,” Lovecraft had established an avid readership and rarely failed to sell a story. His style and skill had also matured. In “The Colour Out of Space” he has established a balance that seemed to have pleased both him and his pulp editors.

Even his most avid fans are inclined to chuckle over his use—or overuse—of his favorite words, especially “eldritch” (strange or weird, especially in a way that invokes fear), which appears 23 times in the 65 stories in H. P. Lovecraft: The Complete Collection. In “The Colour Out of Space,” he produces the archaic “nefandous” (unspeakable or not-to-be-spoken-of), which he seems to have used only twice in his career—once here and once in At the Mountains of Madness.

He occasionally stretched meanings. He uses “cyclopean” to mean “giant” 47 times in the collection, although it doesn’t appear in “The Colour Out of Space.” Technically, the word translates as “round-eye” and refers to a particular race of giants characterized by a single eye, but to simply describe something as “gigantic” doesn’t capture the sense of inhuman alien menace that Lovecraft sought. He does something similar in “The Colour Out of Space,” referring to the meteorite three times with the less familiar and more exotic-sounding term “aerolite,” a stony meteorite composed largely of silicates. He also describes the meteorite as stony or metallic, with strong magnetic properties. Perhaps its alienness gives it attributes of both.

Lovecraft might have had a point when he said that the pulps had affected his style detrimentally; he was capable of great poetry in his prose. On the other hand, without that pulp influence, perhaps he would have gotten carried away with language and never reached the balance of plot and style that he achieves here and in his later work.