
“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson. In the story by H.P. Lovecraft, he does a wonderful job of illustrating this exact concept. This essay will be a look into the literary devices used in H.P. Lovecraft’s “Rats in The Walls” to describe just how one mad person might see the void, looking back up it as they fall down the rabbit hole. This is a close reading essay based around how Lovecraft uses rats as an allusion to mental illness and the degradation of a man's sanity while also explaining things like dementia, alzheimer's, and schizophrenia through the eyes and ears of the victim.

The story starts off with an old man recounting the tales of a house he reacquired for himself which used to belong to his ancestors.  He describes it as a victorian era house carved from limestone sitting atop a cliff overlooking a large valley. The narrator tells us of how the house had a twisted past connected to it, or so he heard from his family and some of their papers he found from over the years. Some of the stories from the local village were of the screaming and howling that would come from that old place; how the father murdered all of his family in that house before escaping. It is through this description of the narrator's past  that lovecraft sets up a perfect connection of clues for the reader to begin to infer the possible past of mental illness and insanity running through the veins of the narrator. 

The first mention we see of the rats is a telling of how one of the family members used to hear their father ramble on about the rats and how, “the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle…”. The way he phrases this takes the readers artistic choices and gives the words that feeling of being recounted as the ramblings of a mad man. Words like obscene and bursting give the type of exaggeration you would find in someone hallucinating a horrible event or even how their mind is hiding from them the real terrible event that occurred with this illusion. 

One of the more notable encounters with the rats that moves the reader to the idea of the darkness creeping in on the narrator is when he says, “...for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound—the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats.” . Often times mental patients will have this sensation of loud, constant and omnipresent noises such as voices or banging. This could be allusion to the early symptoms of psychosis, a disease where the brain can cause hallucinations eventually driving the victim to act irrationally be it through aggression, both physically and mentally. We can see the symptoms in the continued description of the house where the narrator describes it as “ a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens”. He seems to be cursing the place almost with these words. Words that make the reader think of an old mansion sitting on a hill with many winding corridors and doors, a place where someone could easily get lost. It could be that he uses the word jumble to describe how our narrator might be forgetting the ins and outs of the old house due to dementia. 

Another encounter with the rats which proves to be one of the most compelling arguments for our narrator going insane is a point where he is in the basement with his friend inspecting the altar when all of the sudden he begins to hear the rats. He describes them as deafening and he can hear that they’re coming from up above them and going even deeper into the mountain. When he asks his friend if he heard that “spectral” noise he says he didn’t. The use of this word compels the reader to see that these creatures he has become so zealous about are only in his mind. The fact that this other person does not perceive the presence of the rats in any way gives a sort of mad desperation to the character. He seems to be yearning to prove that these creatures really are there even though he has no solid evidence that they are. The description of these rats seems to only get more and more visceral as the story goes on.

The final encounter with the rats is one described in an odd way, the best way to sum it up is that the narrator begins to describe how he sees human bones with rat bones mixed in in these large pits. This is where his grounding to reality seems to fade when begins describing these pits. He paints them as these impossibly deep pits that seem to go to the core of the earth and how he slips into the darkness feeling the rats crawl and scratch around him. This scene is brought to an end with him screaming, blood covered, hunched over the half eaten corpse of his friend. The narrator is then locked up in an asylum and the story ends quite abruptly but its from this scene we can finally see him succumb to his psychosis and weather he was conscious of what he was doing or not he ends up killing and eating his friend in cold blood, much like he describes the rats to do with the corpse of dogs and livestock in one of his dreams. A dream in which there is this livestock that get eaten alive by these rats as they stream over the pen. He is found there over the corpse screaming about how he will not be like the livestock, relating himself rather to these rats. The way he words this ending scene is a bit confusing though where he first starts describing it through his point of view and possibly leaving it very vague when hes describing the descent into the pits. One could argue it’s from the point of view of a rat scurrying around looking for scraps from these human sacrifices made that happens to slip and fall into this “pit of malice” as quoted from the text.

Often times in patients with psychosis it's common for a person to attach their illness on to a being or manifestation that they hallucinate as the ones performing the actions. H.P. love craft does a great job of attaching our thoughts to these rats that plague the narrator driving him to do insane things, turning these rats into a kenning of sorts that he uses to show the narrator's insanity through their eyes. It was once said that the insane do not know that they are insane, but through the symbolism of these rats we are able to interpret what it might be like for someone suffering from one of these diseases. Through strong wordplay and an incredible ability to set up a melancholy scene that he paints this struggle we can argue that he was indeed describing one man's descent into the void or even an old man suffering from dementia slowly wasting away at his ability to hold on to reality.