Sample Analysis of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West–Reanimator”

Justin Rogers
The Fantastic OER Writing Sample
Dr. James Francis
12 July 2022

Doubleness and Juxtaposition in “Herbert West—Reanimator”[1]

H.P. Lovecraft is known for being a trailblazer in horror fiction as well as science fiction. He is also credited with making genre horror fiction more popular in the public eye, especially with his creation of the Cthulhu mythos. What many people do not know is his particular short story, written in about the middle of his career, “Herbert West—Reanimator”[1] (1922) is one of the first modern zombie stories. In a Gothic fashion, Lovecraft juxtaposes images of helpfulness, beauty, and bravery with their counterparts in cruelty, debasement, and the grotesque. Furthermore, he uses the creation of zombies as a form of magical realism to place the horror elements of his story in the everyday world to highlight the horrors of war going on at the time of his story’s publication.[2]

2. For this two-part thesis (thesis statements can be more than one sentence), the writer indicates what happens in the story and the relevance of its content. This serves as a claim to lead essay content, an organization method that guides the body paragraphs, the reader, and the writer as they develop the essay.

“Herbert West—Reanimator” is narrated by the only friend of the titular Herbert West. The narrator remains unnamed through the story and there is rarely a moment where the narrator does not accompany Herbert West. The two of them start out as medical students but eventually graduate to being doctors in their own right.[1] Herbert West is an adept medical practitioner but his interest is not in healing the living. West wants to figure out a way to revive the dead and he enlists the narrator as his assistant through the years as he attempts to find a way to consistently bring back those who have passed. He has varying levels of success but in the process loses himself as well as creating monstrous creatures all along the way.

Lovecraft foreshadows from the beginning of the short story that West is someone to fear and that something bad is going to happen to him over the course of the narrative.[1] The story begins by having the narrator note, “Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance” (Lovecraft).[2] By doing this, Lovecraft sets up the relationship between the narrator and West as well as incorporating an anxiety within the reader by associating West with terror while also foreshadowing that West will have a sinister disappearance. The very beginning of the short story is aimed to produce a feeling of anticipation within the reader through the use of this foreshadowing. This is also a moment of juxtaposition where Lovecraft will continually juxtapose Herbert West’s status as a doctor and his unassuming demeanor with fearful emotions so that the reader is always aware of the terrible phenomena surrounding West despite his appearance.

2. This quote is obtained from an online source that has no page numbers, so the parenthetical reference only contains the author’s last name.. Always check the appropriate style manual to ensure proper formatting and documentation.

Despite what our narrator says about West, every outward indication about the man would lead one to believe he is an honorable and upstanding practitioner of medicine. West is constantly described as blond, blue-eyed, calm, able to get into high positions and win people over. Yet all the while the narrator says he is cold and calculating. The times that West gets into trouble are only when he persists in trying to convince people of his theory “on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially” (Lovecraft). He believes that the body is nothing but a composition of different chemicals and death is a process that can be diverted through the injection of a particular chemical solution into a recently deceased corpse. This leads West and the narrator, acting as his assistant throughout, to inject multiple bodies with a specially-made solution.[1] What is important to note throughout is that West never talks about humans as if they are people. He only ever thinks of his fellow humans as bodies consisting of various natural processes. West and the narrator even go so far as to get a house next to the Potter’s Field, a place where poor and unknown people are buried, so that they can dig up recently deceased corpses for their experiments. The people that the pair dig up are referred to only as corpses or as objects, showing the reader that the interest of the characters is not in helping the recently deceased. What the two doctors really want to accomplish is defying death. There is a doubleness to everything going on as the narrator continues to assert, “West’s sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution” (Lovecraft). While West acts as a doctor outwardly, his real interest is not in healing people so much as figuring out a way for humans to transcend death. He has no scruples about defiling graves or injecting people with his serum against their will. This means that West’s outward appearance as a doctor is misleading because he is more of a mad scientist conducting experiments than he is healing people.

West and the narrator have varying levels of success with their experimentation but the narrator notices that as time goes on West’s “scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal” (Lovecraft). The two doctors manage to cause some of the formerly deceased to rise up but they do not behave like humans anymore—they are abominations at best.[1] Some, West manages to kill again, some manage to get away, and one is in an asylum because the creature was thought to be a cannibalistic man. West eventually moves from trying to defy death to trying to make limbs move perpetually even when detached from the rest of the body. To this end, he enters into World War I as a physician and brings the narrator along with him. The narrator notes that “at times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind” (Lovecraft), once again making sure the reader sees this juxtaposition of the good West coupled with his unutterable experimentation.

Experimenting on living people is a change in West’s methodology because before now he was only working with the recently deceased. He is getting increasingly bolder and more brazen with his work and it becomes more obvious that he cares less about helping the soldiers, seeing them as expendable in the course of his experimentation. This is also the point in the narrative where what West is creating becomes more important than ever as he gets very good at creating zombified limbs and wholesale zombies. In Kristine Hart and John Paul’s analysis of zombie soldiers in literature, “The Desperate, Drafted, and the Dead: A Literary Analysis of American Solider Zombie Tales”, they use “Herbert West–Reanimator” as a prime example of how zombies are an effective metaphor for the treatment of American soldiers during 20th century warfare because they are depicted as mindless, faceless, disposable, units.[1] They argue illuminatingly that, “Lovecraft’s zombie was a creature that offered a new vision of what it meant to be (post)human in a time of war; the reduction of men to disabled bodies. . .and grotesque military creatures augmented to be weapons of war” (Hart and Paul 7). West is beneficial to the soldiers but only insofar as he has to be in order to use other parts of them for his own interests. West does not see the soldiers as individuals so much as fresh flesh he can use to meet his own goals in the same way that American soldiers were used as expendable pawns to win war.[2] However, the abominations West cavalierly creates eventually mete out their revenge on him for his unjust experimentation on them. While West is working on soldiers, he ends up detaching the head of a former Major in the military. This man is significant not just for his military rank but also because West shared how he reanimates the dead to some extent. West manages to keep the head and body both alive despite being separated from each other. Unfortunately for West, this headless man escapes the area, gathers up the previous abominations that also got away from West over the years, and after some time they exact their revenge on West by ripping him to pieces in front of the narrator.

2. The writer makes a relevant comment about real-world horrors that connects back to their initial thesis. Including specific details about the time period, the particular war, and American-soldier involvement would enhance and clarify the discussion more.

In this story, Lovecraft uses this doubleness of meaning to its utmost by showing West’s benevolence coupled with his coldness, helpfulness with depravity, and finally the magical realism of bringing people back from the dead juxtaposed with the use of American soldiers thrown into World War I.[1] This creates a work of horror fiction that ends up cutting dangerously close to the real-life horror people lived through at the time of the story’s publishing during the aftermath of the first World War in 1922.

Works Cited[1]