Randolf Carter in Shadow of the Unnamable
Randolph Carter is a recurring protagonist in the Cthulhu Mythos and the Dream Cycle. An antiquarian, adventurer and visionary, he devoted his life to the exploration of the unknown.
Personality[]
Carter shares many of Lovecraft's personal traits: he is an uncelebrated author, whose writings are seldom noticed. A melancholy figure, Carter is a quiet contemplative dreamer with a sensitive disposition, prone to fainting during times of emotional stress. But he can also be courageous, with enough strength of mind and character to face and foil the horrific creatures of the Dreamlands.
Biography[]
Based on clues from various stories, Randolph Carter was probably born around 1874 and grew up in and around Boston. Не is the descendant of Sir Randolph Carter, who had studied magic during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Sir Randolph had then emigrated to America and his son Edmund Carter later had to flee the Salem witch-trials. Carter also had an ancestor involved in one of the Crusades, who was captured by the Muslims and learned "wild secrets" from them.
In Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II, Randolph Carter is said to be the great-nephew of John Carter.
At the age of nine, Randolph underwent a mysterious experience at his great-uncle Christopher's farm and thereafter exhibited a gift of prophecy.
Randolph Carter graduated from Miskatonic University. Не served in the French Foreign Legion during the First World War, and was badly wounded in fighting near Belloy-en-Santerre in 1916, presumably during the Battle of the Somme in which the Legion participated. During the war, Carter became acquainted with Étienne-Laurent de Marigny.
Carter first appears in "The Statement of Randolph Carter", a short story Lovecraft wrote in 1919 based on one of his dreams. In this story Carter and his occultist friend, Harley Warren, attempt to locate the door between the human world and a hell dimension. Though Carter survives Warren was killed by an unseen evil.
"The Unnamable" begins with Carter in conversation with his friend Joel Manton, principal of a New England high school, discussing the supposedly mythical creature that bears the story's name. The tale is set in a 17th-century cemetery as evening falls. Initially, Manton is skeptical and ridicules Carter for thinking that such a being may be possible. As darkness encroaches - and as Carter's descriptions become more detailed and supported by facts - his flippant dismissal gradually gives way to fear. The two are attacked by the monster but survive the experience.
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" - one of Lovecraft's longest works - follows Carter for several months searching for the lost city of his dreams, Kadath. The story reveals Carter's familiarity with much of Lovecraft's universe. Carter is also shown to possess considerable knowledge of the politics and geography of the Dreamlands and has allies there. After an elaborate odyssey, Carter awakens in his Boston apartment with only a fleeting impression of the world he left behind, though he now knows what the lost city actually is.
"The Silver Key" finds Carter entering middle age and losing his "key to the gate of dreams". No longer is Carter able to escape the mundane realities of life and enter the Dreamlands that alone has given him happiness. Wonder is gone and he has forgotten the fact that life is nothing more than a set of mental images, where there is no fundamental distinction between dreams and reality and no reason to value one above the other. In an attempt to recover his lost innocence, Carter returns to his childhood home and finds a mysterious Silver Key, which allows him to enter a cave and magically emerge again in the year 1883 as a child, full of wonder, dreams, and happiness. He remains in this condition until 1928.
On October 7, 1928, Carter vanished in the ruins of his family's ancestral mansion outside Arkham. A few of his friends asserted that Carter had gone back to the Dreamlands to become the king of Ilek-Vad. This is confirmed in Brian Lumley's "The Clock of Dreams" and Kij Johnson's "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe", where Randolph Carter is known to be the former lover of Vellitt Boe.
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key," written in collaboration with Lovecraft admirer E. Hoffman Price, details Carter's adventures in another dimension where he encounters a more primordial version of himself (implied to be Yog-Sothoth) who explains that Carter - and indeed all beings - are ultimately nothing more than manifestations of a greater being. Carter's mind ends up trapped in the body of an alien, another facet of the higher being. The investigation into Carter's disappearance takes place four years later, in 1932.
"Out of the Aeons" by Lovecraft and Hazel Heald features a brief 1931 appearance by Carter, while trapped in the alien body. He visits a museum exhibiting an ancient mummy from a long-forgotten civilization and recognizes some of the writing on the scroll that accompanies it.
In the Dream Cycle computer game, Carter is an antagonist who wants to ascend to godhood. He is opposed by his great-great-grandniece Morgan.
Appearances[]
In Thomas Lapperre's book The Uncertainty, Randolph Carter appears as a main character, following up after "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
In David Haden's Tales of Lovecraftian Cats, Carter's ancestor Sir Randolph Carter is the protagonist in "Beware the Cat". This story is followed by the linked "How the Grimmalkin Came", which also serves as a sequel to Lovecraft's "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
Randolph Carter is a prominent character in Lovecraftian: The Shipwright Circle by Steven Philip Jones. The Lovecraftian series reimagines the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft into one single universe modern epic.
Randolph Carter is the main character in two short stories, both included in the volume Los Espectros Conjurados by Spanish author Alberto Lopez Aroca: "El ojo que repta" ("The Crawling Eye") and "Randolph Carter y el Trono de Opalo" ("Randolph Carter and the Opal Throne"), which features another of Lovecraft's characters, Richard Upton Pickman. Carter also makes a cameo appearance in "Los Sabios en Salamanca" ("The Sages in Salamanca"), a short novel by the same author and included in the same volume, starring Professor Challenger and Abraham Van Helsing.
Carter also appears (along with Richard Pickman and many other Lovecraft's characters) in the novel "Necronomicon Z" (Dolmen, 2012), set in Arkham and the Dreamlands.
Randolph Carter appears in "Allan and the Sundered Veil", a serialized prose backup in the first six issues of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book as well as in "The New Traveller's Almanac". In it, he is stated as being a faculty member of Miskatonic University as well as a relative of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter.
Randolph Carter appears in Cosa Nosferatu, by E. J. Priz, as an old friend of Eliot Ness who involves Ness in an adventure that eventually entangles Ness, Capone, and the Undead. The novel references events in "The Statement of Randolph Carter" and also includes Harley Warren (from that Lovecraft story) as a character, along with references to aspects of the Chtulhu Mythos.
Randolph Carter appears in the novel The Weird Company, by Peter Rawlik, in his guise as the Swami Chandraputra. The novel is a sequel to Rawlik's novel Reanimators, itself a companion piece and re-imagining of Lovecraft's Herbert West-Reanimator stories.
Randolph Carter is the main character of Kye Byllesby's novel The Chronicles of Randolph Carter.
Randolph Carter is referenced in the slang oath "Carter's Cross" in K. M. Alexander's Bell Forging Cycle.
Behind the Scenes[]
Lovecraft's character may have been based on a real-life Randolph Carter, who was a Scholar at Christ's College, in the University of Cambridge, from 1892-1895. Carter took his Part I Tripos in Oriental Studies (Arabic), and his Part II in Egyptology. While at Cambridge, he was an acquaintance of Sir James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. Carter's whereabouts after Cambridge are unclear, but, like his fictional namesake, he may have used the French Foreign Legion as a route into exploring the North African deserts. College records do not indicate whether Carter was a US or British citizen.