Hello Everyone. This is the second week of our Dream Cycle book club. In this thread we will be discussing the stories read last week: Polaris and The White Ship.
Our reading assignment for this week are two more short stories: The Doom that Came to Sarnath and The Cats of Ulthar.
Our first story, The Doom that Came to Sarnath was written in 1919, the same year as The White Ship. It is available via the Internet Archive here and can be found in audio format via LibriVox here
Our second story, The Cats of Ulthar was written in 1920. It is available via the same link provided above, and in audio format it can be found via LibriVox here
The first two stories of the Dream Cycle offer a more personal horror than the mind-bending cosmic horror which we’ve come to expect from Lovecraft. Both short stories feature some manner of watchman who is forcefully drawn from his duty by some form of fainting or narcolepsy. The end result is the same: an avoidable disaster brought about by the watchman deserting his post, and some form of revelation leading the watchman to wonder whether they are still dreaming.
I decided to look further into this and the idea of dereliction of duty was a common worry of Lovecraft at this point in time. The first World War began in 1914; the US joined the war in 1917, a year before Lovecraft wrote Polaris. Before the US joined the war Lovecraft often expressed dissatisfaction at the lack of an American response. Lovecraft was an Anglophile to an obsessive degree and viewed the UK and particularly England as America’s ancestral fatherland which was currently under threat. In Polaris we see a similar struggle in the waking man believing he is the watchman of his dreams, and that he must wake from this “dream” in order to save his land from catastrophe.
Lovecraft attempted to join the war effort in various capacities but he was prone to fainting fits, similar to the watchman in Polaris. He also attempted to join the National Guard of Rhode Island, though this was thwarted by his mother. We see this mirrored in the two stories as both watchmen find themselves incapable of waking from their dreams in order to prevent disaster.