At the Mountains of Madness

Danforth is a young student who accompanies the scientists on the expedition to Antarctica. Without the title of professor, he is a junior member of the party and accepts that he has a lot to learn. When he travels into the city with Dyer, for example, he is deferential and obedient. This attitude establishes Danforth as one of the more innocent members of the expedition. He has no real demonstrable flaws, but he is humble and keen to learn. This innocence only makes his downfall more tragic.

Dyer alludes to Danforth’s break from sanity throughout the novel. He writes about Danforth with regret, almost as though he feels responsible for what happened to his former student. While escaping from the city in the airplane, Dyer takes over the controls from a shaken Danforth, who then glances back over the city toward the distant mountain range that filled the Old Ones with fear. While doing so, he has a vision. Danforth never shares the contents of this vision, but it’s so dreadful that he loses his mind. Unlike Dyer, who writes the novel to prevent another expedition, Danforth can never bring himself to tell anyone about the horrors he has seen. Danforth becomes a sacrificial figure in the narrative; the destruction of his innocent mind establishes the scale of the horrors that reside in Antarctica’s unknown regions.

Professor Lake is a keen scientist and an excitable presence in the early stages of the novel. He is a leader of the expedition whose fellow scientists value him. However, he is the first to diverge from the agreed plan. Acting on a hunch, he takes one of the airplanes and insists on exploring a certain region of Antarctica. This insistence is the first sign of Lake’s arrogance. He feels justified in following his own intellect and defying his colleagues. Unfortunately for Lake, his hunch proves correct. He makes the most important scientific discovery in human history, and as a result he dies in brutal fashion; in fact, his hasty excavation and dissection of the Old Ones results in the deaths of everyone in the camp. Lake embodies the hubris that Dyer worries will be the end of humanity. 

The Old Ones are an ancient race of aliens that colonized Earth millions of years before humans evolved. They are strangely shaped creatures that can live seemingly forever; those Lake’s team discovers return to life and murder everyone in the camp. As such, the story introduces the Old Ones through the lens of mysterious violence and indifference to human life.

Dyer’s time in the city complicates this picture. He sees the Old Ones’ architecture and their art, realizing that they are capable of culture and intelligence far beyond anything humans can experience. Dyer realizes that the Old Ones are not necessarily violent; they simply consider humans irrelevant.

The Old Ones are notable for their absence from the narrative. Many of their appearances are secondhand, such as in Lake’s radio broadcasts or the artwork Dyer finds in their city. Dyer himself only encounters dead Old Ones. Their absence from the narrative adds to the sense that the Old Ones are intellectually far removed from the human experience, but this removal does not mean that Dyer cannot feel sympathy for them. His time in their city allows him to empathize with the alien creatures. He begins to understand their art, even developing nuanced opinions of the different periods of artistic production. When he sees an Old One killed by a Shoggoth, he is shocked that he feels empathy toward it. They are strange, terrifying creatures, but Dyer also sees them as intellectual, emotional beings.