A retórica da dúvida: inconfiabilidade, focalização interna e a construção do estranho na literatura de horror cósmico de H.P. Lovecraft

Abstract

This work analyzes the structure of cosmic horror in the short story The Whisperer in Darkness (2010) by H. P. Lovecraft, focusing on the narrator's unreliability as the main mechanism for constructing fear. The research is justified by the need to understand how the textual mechanics of horror literature prove that the genre's effectiveness does not reside solely in the figure of the monster, but in the failure of language and human perception itself. To this end, the theoretical framework adopts authors such as Gérard Genette (1989) and his analysis of focalization modes, especially internal focalization, which restricts the reader's access to the character's limited consciousness; Tzvetan Todorov (2004) on fantastic hesitation as a condition of the genre; Wayne C. Booth (1980) and his theory on the rhetoric of fiction, particularly the concepts of reliable and unreliable narrators, emphasizing the notion of "unconsciousness" as a source of unreliability; Sigmund Freud (1919) regarding the concept of the "uncanny" (unheimlich); and Lovecraft himself (2008) on the fear of the unknown as the foundation of cosmic horror. The work is structured into three chapters: the first demonstrates, within the short story, how narrative focalization, the marks of the fantastic genre, and the narrator's unreliability occur, in addition to discussing the psychological aspect of cosmic horror; the second analyzes the persona of the narrator Wilmarsh, his limitations as a man of science, and the use of the epistolary genre as a resource for double unreliability; the third connects the strategies of rhetorical manipulation to the final aesthetic effect, concluding that the collapse of the narrator's sanity reflects the absolute human insignificance in the face of the unknown universe. All these aspects attest that the narrator's unreliability in Lovecraft's short story is not a technical flaw or a mere suspense device, but a fundamental aesthetic necessity to express the central idea of cosmic horror: the human mind is organically incapable of conceiving and reporting what goes beyond the limits of terrestrial reality without losing its sanity.