At the Mountains of Madness

Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1936

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Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

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Themes

The Horror of the Unknowable

At the Mountains of Madness exemplifies what would become known as Lovecraftian horror. This genre of horror relies strongly on the idea that true horror is unknowable, indescribable, and incomprehensible. The very setting of the story is significant in this respect, since Antarctica’s climate makes it one of the least explored—and therefore least known or knowable—regions of the Earth. The supernatural elements of the novel build on this premise. Lake struggles to tell whether the Old Ones are plant or animal, which suggests that their existence defies the narrow intellectual categories into which he tries to place everything. Likewise, the Shoggoths’ shifting shape terrifies Dyer because he can never truly know or understand it. Encountering the unknowable traumatizes Danforth even more obviously, as the vision he experiences on the plane ride back from the Old Ones’ city causes him to have a nervous breakdown.

Dyer’s frequent proclamations that he cannot truly describe the horrific sights he has experienced provide useful context for Danforth’s reaction. Language is in part a way to make sense of the world. Because Dyer lacks the words to explain or even recount events so far removed from normal human experience, the events themselves necessarily remain senseless. Faced with this impasse, the rational mind breaks down, as Dyer explains in his encounter with a Shoggoth: “[The sight] crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned” (278).

A central paradox of At the Mountains of Madness (and much of Lovecraft’s work) is that it attempts to get around this impasse, describing what it claims can’t be described. Lovecraft’s famously ornate writing style, which relies on multiple and often florid adjectives and adverbs, is a response to this contradiction. So too are Dyer’s references to other works, which attempt to find a common reference point in the human experience to describe the indescribable. The novel implies that these efforts are futile, however; the authors of these works often lost their minds or suffered terrible deaths, indicating that truly understanding the knowledge they hint at in their work is impossible. This is one reason why Dyer’s project in writing the book seems doomed. By trying to explain what can’t be explained he will merely pique people’s curiosity about Antarctica further, and even if he did somehow manage to convey the reality of his experiences, he would destroy his readers in the process.

The Irrelevance of Man

As Dyer attempts to convey the horror of what he experienced in Antarctica, a key theme in his descriptions is how the expedition affected his perception of humanity. Lovecraft was writing at a time when Darwin’s theory of evolution was still relatively new (something even truer of the writers who influenced Lovecraft, like Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany). The scientific discoveries of the 19th century deeply shook many people’s understanding of the world; with all of human history just a brief episode in the Earth’s history more generally, it became difficult to see humans as in any way special.

The shock and dread that this inspired form the backdrop to Lovecraft’s works. Dyer and his team are scientists, but they have substituted faith in their ability to understand the world for faith in their importance within it. They are intellectuals who consider themselves to be on the cutting edge of human knowledge. They have dedicated their lives to science and learning as much as possible about the world. As a result, they tend toward arrogance. They set out with narcissistic goals, intent on solidifying their reputations and burnishing their credentials. They view themselves and their species as the most advanced beings on Earth and hope to demonstrate this with a string of new discoveries.

The arrogance of the scientists proves to be misplaced. Though Lake is initially excited by his discoveries and begins thinking about how to manage his new fame and fortune, he does not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labors. Lake and his men are killed, while the other scientists are so traumatized by their experiences that they refuse to talk about them in public. The formerly arrogant, narcissistic scientists disavow their success and retreat into the shadows. They do this because the existence of the Old Ones is a blow to their collective ego as well as the harbinger of a horrifying realization. The advanced nature of the Old Ones’ society and their extreme intelligence make the scientists feel utterly irrelevant. Their lives have been spent refining their knowledge of science, only to discover that an alien race accomplished far more, far longer ago. The existence of the Old Ones makes the human race an irrelevant afterthought—nothing more than a race of pet apes who happen to have developed a little in the Old Ones’ absence.

The realization of the irrelevance of humanity causes an identity crisis for the scientists. They no longer know how to view themselves in a world that their discoveries have thoroughly changed. Dyer might have once considered himself an important geologist, but now he knows that all his research and his career have accomplished nothing. By the end of the novel, Dyer sees himself and his species as an irrelevant blip in history rather than its most important driving force.

The Inevitable Decline of Civilization

Part of the horror of At the Mountains of Madness stems from the fact that even the Old Ones’ society suffered some kind of collapse. The implication is that if a society so much more advanced than any human civilization could (at worst) die out or (at best) have to retreat into some sort of hibernation, there is little hope for the long-term survival of human culture. Dyer’s ultimate sympathy for the Old Ones strongly reflects this sense of shared destiny: “[P]oor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? […] Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!” (150).

What exactly led to the decline of the Old Ones is never entirely clear. However, Dyer’s speculations are significant in light of Lovecraft’s views on human society. In describing the evolution of the Old Ones’ art, Dyer repeatedly describes a particular era as “decadent”—a word that evokes moral or intellectual decay or corruption. At the time Lovecraft was writing, concerns about decadence were all but inseparable from eugenics, and in particular from fears of race and class mixing. The fact that Lovecraft himself held deeply racist views casts Dyer’s hypotheses about the Old Ones’ reliance on the Shoggoths in a new light: “To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life—a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do” (119).

What Dyer is describing here is a “superior” race (in rationality, morality, etc.) becoming too dependent on an “inferior” (less intelligent, less cultured, etc.) race. The fact that the Shoggoths were slaves has obvious parallels in American history, but there may also be an allusion to immigration. Since the Shoggoths were also manual laborers (unlike the more scholarly Old Ones), a class element is perhaps also at play. Regardless, it is hard to detach the novel’s depiction of the collapse of great civilizations from the author’s views on the supposed threat things like interracial relationships and labor organizing posed to Anglo-America.