The Rats In The Walls Analysis

Every town has a family with a mysterious backstory or a building where strange happenings have scared residents away. In H.P. Lovecraft’s The Rats in the Walls the narrator’s good friend Norrys is found dead and gnawed on inside the recently renovated Exham Priory. This prompts the question: Who killed Norrys and how exactly did he end up in the strange position he did? All indications point to the narrator being the culprit, as his strange family history, bizarre, nightmarish delusions, and the very fact that he was found next to the rotting body is too much evidence to simply ignore. The narrator devotes the first few pages of the story to describing his limited knowledge of his family history. He states that he was “kept wholly ignorant”
However, one night the cat that he sleeps with begins acting strangely by jumping “violently from his placid position” and began “looking intensely at a point on the wall” (21). The narrator quickly tries to attribute it to a sound of scurrying rats, but when he checks the area is empty of any rodents. The next night, while attempting to sleep, he is confronted with a nightmare. In it, he is “looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep in filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts who appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then…a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike” (22). These “rats” are not seen by anyone else in the text and in the last sentence of the text he states that they are “the rats they can never hear” (29). The narrator admits that the rats cannot be seen or heard by any other human. He is having extreme delusions which can lead to exceptionally dangerous actions. If he is having hallucinations of rats in the walls and daemons in the dark caverns his subconscious then he is capable of anything. His mind is not in a place where he can make rational decisions. Therefore, it is not out of the realm of possibility that he killed and ate
The narrator states “they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me in the blackness crouching over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat” (29). After he is found beside Norrys’s body, the public accuses the narrator of killing and eating him. The narrator, however, has another explanation, placing the blame on the rats. The events described leading up to this discovery made him seem unhinged and disturbed. His family history and nightmares were important evidence for the reader to decide whether he had the ability to do something so evil, but this event erases any doubt that the reader could have about whether or not he actually