Describe the storys setting. What will be an ideal response? ...

[saraeharris]

Describe the storys setting.
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Does the narrator seem at the end of the story to have accepted his lot? Doyou find the tone hopeful or forlorn?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[reelove4eva]

Answer to Question 1

• The storys principal settings and atmosphere are Gothic in nature, with a focus on ruins, crypts, decaying castles, cemeteries, and other night-haunted locales. The dark, dank, mysterious chamber of the opening paragraphs is contrasted in the narrators mind with the visions of light and lush greenery that are emblematic of the world he wants to discover and inhabit. Lovecraft described The Outsider as the most Poe-like of his stories, and in its scenes and descriptions one can find echoes of several of Poes classic tales, from The Pit and the Pendulum to The Masque of the Red Death.

Answer to Question 2

• The answer may depend on ones definition of accepted. He has certainly accepted his fate in the sense that he is resigned to its inevitability: I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid (par. 14). He claims in the first paragraph that he is strangely content and says in the next-to-last one that in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. But is there not in all of this a hint of, as it were, whistling past the graveyard? Note the words almost and bitterness in the just-quoted passage. For all that these passages evoke the bravado of the Byronic hero proudly spewing his curses upon the world that has cursed him, there is an unmistakable air of sadness and deep, ineradicable hurt at the conclusion of the story. In the view of many, this is a projection of Lovecrafts sense of himself as an other, an outsider set apart from ordinary human society and its norms.