Throughout the story, Lovecraft uses both sound and silence
to express different elements of strangeness and horror. In some of the most striking moments he juxtaposes
the two in order to heighten the sense of disorientation. For example, “Dying almost-humans screamed,
and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as
their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the
obscene fungi.”
The silence of the toad monsters is noteworthy, but the
quietness of the night-gaunts is even more essential to their impact on the
reader. These creatures are “noxiously
thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged” yet, in flight, “They made no sound
at all themselves, and even their membraneous wings were silent.” This seems to be something more than just
arcane biology – it is almost as though the world itself collaborates with the
monster to create the silence – and why not?
After all, these are the Dream Lands.
Captured and transported by the flying night-gaunts, Carter
is encouraged to share in their silence.
“He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws
tickled him with greater subtlety.” Who
but Lovecraft could make a caress, a tickle, a touch, into something so alien
and monstrous? “And worst of all, they
never spoke or laughed… because they had no faces at all… but only a suggestive
blankness where a face ought to be.” A
night-gaunt is a body of silence, a blank fear, a serpentine intimacy that is
dangerous to human dreams, and to human dreamers.
Image: Odilon Redon, The Monster
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