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McBryde 1Dagon was first penned by Howard Philip Lovecraft in 1917 and appeared in a serial journal,
The Vagrant 
, in 1919 and later was published in
Weird Tales
during the fall of 1923.As the story opens, the narrator, who is never given a name, is despondent, morose,and suicidal. Our protagonist references to taking a drug which is subsequently revealedto be morphine. The partaking of the narcotic is the only thing that, “Makes lifeendurable” (Lovecraft 1). At first glance the reader may assume that the narrator is ill,however, nowhere is a physiological illness mentioned, instead it is a psychologicalailment that besets the man. The extent of his grave condition is established when hestates, “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain” (Lovecraft 1).He has been scared by a traumatic event this his mind will not allow him to forget, andhe, “Can bear the torture no longer” (Lovecraft 1). The narrator is looking for an escapefrom his mental state and his only way out is to take his own life and swan dive out of hiswindow to the ground beneath him. He is concerned how people will react to his suicideand does not want to be remembered as an abuser of morphine or a “weakling or degenerate” (Lovecraft 1).The writing that our protagonist mentions is his suicide letter and we (as the reader)are the unfortunates that discover the final utterance of this man’s life. Even though thissuicide note is written for our behalf, not for sympathy, but for empathy, the narrator informs us that we can never truly fathom why death is his best and only recourse.“When you have read these hastily scrawled pages, you may guess, though ever fullyrealize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death” (Lovecraft 1). In the end the
 
McBryde 2narrator reminds the reader, that we are voyeurs, not participants in the horror that he hasseen and we will never comprehend what has happened to him.Before our man was a mentally anguished, suicidal, drug addict, he was a sea-farer aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean that is captured by a German war boat during the earlyyears of World War I. His capture takes place prior to the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania.We can conclude this by the passage which states, “The great war was at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sank to their later degradation” (Lovecraft 1).Although the rank of our naval narrator is never given, some passages lead one to believe that he may not be of any high rank, maybe even something as lowly as a galleycook or a simple deck-hand. When he is able to escape his captors by boat, he is adrift onthe seas and his nautical abilities come into question. “Never a competent navigator, Icould only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhere south of the equator”(Lovecraft 1). A more seasoned mariner might have had better bearings.Floating like driftwood for days, and near delirium and exhaustion, somethinghappens to the narrator during a period of unconsciousness. His life raft comes to a patchof land, but it is not the relief our drifter was hoping for. He awakens to “A slimyexpanse of hellish black mire” (Lovecraft 1). This mysterious land he has come to isdevoid of life and “putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish and other less describablething” (Lovecraft 2). As if Atlantis itself had arisen from the depths of the ocean, thestranded mariner surmises that due to some seismic or volcanic upheaval this “portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for 
 
McBryde 3innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths(Lovecraft 2).Lovecraft has set up an interesting backdrop here: a mysterious island, a stranded man,and the terror of the unknown. Lovecraft describes the island covered in decay and oozein such a way that it makes the reader believe he has been there himself, and in manyways he had, through a dream that would be the inspiration for the story. In a writingentitled,
 In Defence of Dagon
,(which was published in
Miscellaneous Writings
, byArkham House publications in 1995) HP Lovecraft responds to critic John Ravenor Bullen, who seemed to find it implausible that our protagonist could crawl through themire that was described as being so dense. Lovecraft replies with, “The hero-victim ishalf-sucked into the mire, yet he
does
crawl! He pulls himself along in the detestableooze, tenaciously though it cling to him. I know, for I dreamed that whole hideous crawl,and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down” (
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
, Joshi, S.T. Editor). This is typical of Lovecraft, as many of his writings areinspired by strange dreams (IE.
The Statement of Randolph Carter, Celephais, Nyarlathotep
, to cite a few), some elaborate, and some fragmented.Lovecraft moves our man from brooding with fear at the shores of the island, totrekking across the unknown land three days after he crashed. The narrator described theland as a “rolling desert” (Lovecraft 3). After four days of travel he comes to the base of a mountain where he rest before trying the ascent. His rest was plagued by dreams andvisions that made him awaken “in cold perspiration” (Lovecraft 3).The writing of these strange dreams that are never described is a plot device thatLovecraft later uses in
The Call of Cthulhu
, in which we learn that, this hideous creature
of 00

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