
In H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling tale of a man succumbing to madness, The Rats in the Walls, the patriarch of the Delapore family sets out to restore his ancestral home. However, the ancient walls of Exham Priory hold dark secrets which eventually bring about his downfall. Throughout the story Lovecraft uses the symbol of rats scurrying beyond the walls to represent the house’s sinister past and the narrator’s slow decent into insanity. The narrator being the only character able to hear the rats in the walls, coupled with local superstitions surrounding the estate suggests something ominous and other-worldly is happening. By sampling quotations and major plot points where rats play a pivotal role, this essay will speculate on the meaning of this symbol and how it evolves or takes on new interpretations throughout the text. Paragraphs will discuss different possible meanings of the symbol based on evidence from the text and analyze details from the story. By using H.P. Lovecraft’s own words this paper will dissect the rats and what they symbolize in The Rats in the Walls.Rats living within the walls, only to scurry down into unknown depths in the morning occurs many times in the short story and the symbol is primarily used to depict the narrators decline to madness. The very first time the rats appear in the text they are amongst superstitions the local villagers have surrounding Exham Priory but are disregarded as just ghost stories of a “ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even to hapless human beings” (Lovecraft 79). The narrator quickly dismisses urban legends such as this because of his determination to restore his family estate. Soon after the completion of Exham Priory the many cats living with the narrator and his servants begin to behave strangely, acting as though they heard something in the walls, scratching at something none of the humans could detect. When a helper “suggested the presence of mice or rats” the narrator insisted “there had been no rats there for three hundred years”; however, the following night the sound of gigantic rats scurrying within the walls awoke the narrator (81). Springing out of bed and turning on the lights revealed movement among the tapestries, resembling “a singular dance of death” and suddenly the scurrying of rats became silent (82). The rats clearly symbolize an uncanny presence in the house which torments the narrator and potentially foreshadow a tragic end. Further on in the text, the image of rats begins to occur more frequently until they are the main focus of the text and the narrator is utterly obsessed with finding the rats that no one else seems to hear. The next time rats appear in the story the narrator and his longtime friend Captain Norrys camp the night in the cellar to investigate the unknown disturbance which always antagonizes the cats. For the second time the narrator awakes from a foul dream about “a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts” to the sound of rats crawling in the stone walls of Exham Priory (Lovecraft 82). Once again the other characters do not detect the presence of rats and cannot hear them scampering within the walls. I would argue that the nightmares suffered by the narrator and the rats that appearing soon after are connected, as if they are trying to lead the narrator there or foreshadowing events to come.Up to this point in the story there is no evidence that there are actually rats living inside the walls of Exham Priory that only the narrator can hear, the cats frantically scratching at the walls and few sprung rat traps which could have been coincidence or signs of darker forces at play. However, when the men spend the night in the cellar, the narrator awakes to hear the cats frantically scratching at the walls and the horrific sound of rats sliding around in the walls. But if the narrator so distinctly hears the creatures burrowing within stone walls, “if these were living vermin why did not Norrys hear their disgusting commotion” (Lovecraft 84)? By Captain Norrys inability to hear the rats Lovecraft makes the rats seem a psychological element that’s tormenting the narrators mind and not a physical being. Although the cats clearly sense the rodents meaning that their presence within the walls might mean this isn’t simply the imagination of a delusional old man but instead an eerie and unnatural occurrence which haunts the narrator. The rats now represent a malicious haunting force which harasses the narrator along with the recurring nightmare, this points to either the houses dark past and the sins of the de la Poer family, or foreshadow a tragic end to the story. For a while Exham Priory sleeps peacefully while the narrator and Captain Norrys travel to London, no instances of cats behaving strangely in the night and no rat traps sprung. Because of the strange occurrences on the estate and the recent discovery of an underground cave beneath the cellar, the men travel to London to recruit archeologists and experts to explore the underground and possibly find the source of the rats. The expedition reveals a twilet grotto, a subterranean town filled with demonic symbols and mountains of human bones gnawed on rats just like the grotto seen by the narrator in his dreams. This is important because it confirms the significance of the rats as symbols of death and the ancient evils that still haunt the house. The cursed walls of the Exham Priory still remember the slaughter of human beings performed by the de la Poer family and punish the narrator for the sins of his family. The rats in the walls are the ghostly memory of the monstrosities committed below and target Delapore for his shared blood.The psychological burden suffered by the narrator causes him to snap and lose control of himself in the twilit grotto, the visions of madness returned to the narrator when he separates from his and group and he hears the ravenous army of rats, “the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors” (Lovecraft 88). “That impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising” broke the narrator, overpowering his last bits of sanity as he ran through the cave, possessed by the same ancient evil practiced for generations in Exham Priory. In the last pages of The Rats in the Walls the symbol of rats evolves from a mysterious force that plagues the narrator to an evil or demonic ghost of the de la Poer past that corrupts the narrator and molds him to the cannibalistic and wicked ways of his forefathers.  The rats as a symbol change over the course of the story, originally mention on an off-handed comment about local superstition but the creature eventually take on a demonic energy, driving the narrator to commit acts a sane man never would. The rats represent insanity, evil, and the sins of the past. All the servants of the de la Poer estate, Captain Norrys, and the expedition party never heard or saw rats infesting the walls and caverns beneath the mansion so it seems the beasts are merely hallucinations of a crazed man, or they exist outside of the physical world, as messengers of an ancient god worshipped by his ancestors. The rats may be signs of a curse on the narrator, for his family’s past, murder of countless innocents, or a curse on the very walls of Exham Priory.Also, the descriptive text used to talk about the rats changes. The change in vocabulary serves as good indication of the narrator’s declining mental state, he begins using words like insidious, deamon, ravenous and eldritch to describe the rats as evil, demonic beasts “determined to lead [him] on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players” (Lovecraft 88). The rats represent harbingers of an ancient evil dragging the narrator to insanity in his own twisted fantasy, figments of a paranoid man’s imagination or a very real ancient evil. The story closes with the narrator completely out of his mind, tormented by imaginary rats living behind padded walls that “beckon [him] down to greater horrors than [he] has ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls” (89).
