The Rats In The Walls - Grade: A PDF

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Dr. Haley...

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Haley English 1A 4 April, 2016 Hungry For Flesh H.P. Lovecraft’s, The Rats in the Walls, t ells a story about a descendant of the Delapore family who returns to his ancestral home, the Exham Priory, in England to restore it. He arrives at Anchester and is ostracised by the villagers due to his ancestral history, which at that point, he knows nothing about except the legends he was told. Once the restoration is complete, he starts hearing the scurrying of rats in the walls which only he and his cat Nigger-man are able to hear. The rats de la Poer hears symbolizes his inner fears regarding his past by having a tremendous fear of the unknown. This symbol is shown by Delapore’s recurring dreams and his own apperception of his life and the world. On July 16, 1923, Delapore moved into the Exham Priory and five days after, he learns circumstantial details of the final tragedy and end of his ancestor Walter de la Poer. When the narrator states, “. . . my ancestor . . . having killed all the other members of his household . . . two weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his whole demeanour . . .” this foreshadows what is to come later in the short story in which the narrator soon finds out what that shocking discovery is. Having learned some of his ancestral history, the narrator constantly has this on his mind, and is constantly thinking about what prompted his ancestor to perform such a horrendous act. Due to his mind active with this information, the narrator processes this information using different ways by first imagining the rats in the walls, and soon after having vivid dreams that later seem to have come true. He imagines himself in a “twilit grotto, deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous . . . a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.”

These dreams themselves do not reveal much, rather, they are more ambiguous than telling. The narrator explains the dreams as a sense of feeling “harassed . . . of the most horrible sort,” which can be interpreted as his true inner thoughts struggling to break free to show who he really is mentally, a descendent of his cannibalistic ancestors and his fears becoming like them. These dreams hold a similar aspect in comparison to the rats he imagines in regards to the fact that they only appeared when his ancestral information was disclosed to him. If it had not been for that, his imagination would not have expanded as wide. Also, the recurring dreams Delapore has extends his fear of the unknown by how he tries to overanalyze what the dream could mean rather than to take it as just the nightmare it is. He knows that he needs to find out the deep and true meaning of his ambiguous dream to understand where he came from and what is to come. So therefore, the rats are a symbolism of what he fears which is portrayed in the narrator’s dreams. An individual’s apperception is very telling about their demeanour and thought process within the mind which can also be derived from their surroundings. The narrator's surroundings, the Exham Priory, can be interpreted as a representation of the mind, particularly the narrator's. The vault to the hidden room, where the majority of the rats were, was in basement. The basement, which is beneath the house, can be interpreted as the narrator’s subconscious, while the upper levels of a house would symbolize the more conscious mind. While the narrator descends the stairs in the Exham Priory, he is more fearful of the unknown which causes him to be more aware of the scurrying of rats within the oak-panelled walls, than if he were to be upstairs. Also, the act of descending in the house can be reasoned as the fact the narrator wants to regress to a barbaric state, the foundation of his mind, which is full of his ancestral genetics. The narrator’s fear of the unknown is symbolized through the rats by his apperception. There is still some part of the narrator that unknowingly wants to regress to the cannibalism of his ancestors in which his subconscious  is telling to retreat to his old ancestral ways by the act of

descending below the house, deep within his mind. Towards  the end, when Delapore and his team went down to the sub-cellar for exploration, Delapore’s searchlight went out. He starts going insane and conclusively is found over the half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys. Light is a symbol of awareness and without light, there is metaphorically a loss of awareness and innocence which contributed to the narrator’s action. Also, Delapore ate Norrys in the dark, and the dark and the rats are both commonly also associated with immorality, sin, and temptation of sin. He had a loss of mental consciousness or a loose consciousness of how he was behaving at that point in time. Conclusively, the narrator also refers to Norrys as “plump” before the climactic scene as if his inner cannibalistic genetics were lurking under the surface all along. The rats, basically ghosts, were psychic imprints of a past of ineffable evil. Even though the rats are not real physical rats, they are very real in the fact that they are the presence of history immersing him because he has been actively looking to revive something dormant within his mind by the help of the rats which hold the traditions and history of the Exham Priory, both literally and figuratively. Evidently, the narrator’s fear of the unknown is symbolized through the rats through his recurring dreams and his apperception of his surroundings. The rats did not appear to the narrator until he overanalyzed his ancestral history from what was being said about them to him. The narrator had a fear of the unknown and what was to come, including the fear of becoming like his ancestors...