ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Lovecraft’s prose poem “Nyarlathotep” (1920) in light of contemporary concerns about just how difficult it is to make sense of an unknowable and overwhelming world. It focuses primarily on how the final paragraph of “Nyarlathotep” suggests that the once-confident first-person narrator has somehow disappeared in his own text and that he no longer has the capacity to represent his own experience. Faced with this sense of loss, the narrator can only open himself up to the strange displacement that comes from encountering what we might understand as a broader Lovecraftian eschatology.
