Shifting Identities

Through the author's description of characters both deliberately and unintentionally changing identities, he shows how the ability to construct your own sense of identity can be freeing, while at the same time, factors outside of your control might have more impact on your identity than you would care to admit.

The most obvious example of consciously shifting one's identity is seen in L. C. Spinks. Over the course of the novel, Spinks portrays himself as two people different from his true self. First, he claims to be Robert Barlow, friend of H. P. Lovecraft. He creates a fiction in which he, as Barlow, loved Lovecraft, but Lovecraft was too frightened of his feeling for Barlow to act, or he was simply incapable of love. Though the only explanation we get from Spinks himself as to why he faked his identity is that he "[hates] everyone...