Randolph Carter: A Sociopathic Approach
“When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether...” As Howard Phillips Lovecraft narrates in his tale, it is easy to imagine the terrible frustration Randolph Carter has faced for many years before the discovery of the silver key, an existence reduced to a gray reality of empty patterns and behaviors, a cage for the mind and for the soul... The inability to escape from reality and to avoid the sad emptiness and useless effort of living is just a sweet common reality between Carter and us.