61 pages • 2 hours read
Robert W. ChambersThe King in Yellow
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Unreliable Narrator
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health.
Several the stories make use of the unreliable narrator as a literary device to add tension to the story. This literary device is one in which the point-of-view character or first-person narrator is in some way untrustworthy or unreliable in their telling of the story. The unreliability of a narrator is inherent first-person narratives and this unreliability can be heighted by suggestions that the character is actively lying in their narrative or misunderstands their own circumstances in some way.
In the case of both “The Repairer of Reputations,” and “In the Court of the Dragon,” the first-person narrator through whom the reader receives the story is unreliable due to possible mental incapacity. These point-of-view characters have read the play, The King in Yellow, which drives its readers “mad,” according to the lore established within the stories. Both Castaigne and the unnamed narrator of “In the Court of the Dragon,” may be experiencing a break from reality or at the very least, have a skewed perception of the events that take place in the story. Because of this, every event in the story is called into question and the reader cannot know for sure what is real and what is not. This literary device therefore contributes to theme of questioning Interpretations of Reality.
The unreliable narrator is a common device in horror and gothic stories because it allows for a heightened suspension of disbelief. A first-person narrator may recount events that, inside normal experience, could not be true, although they assert the truth of their experience. The reasons for this may be uncertain and this uncertainty can add to the suspense or mystery of the story and ambiguate its overall meaning.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which the author places small clues early in a text that hint toward something that will happen later in the story, often at the ending. These clues can be in the form of a piece of dialogue, description of an item that will reappear later, or exposition about some past event or person that will be important later, among other things. Chambers employs foreshadowing in many places throughout The King in Yellow.
In the first story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” uses foreshadowing in two important places. First, the narrator focuses attention on the first lethal chamber that has just opened on Washington Square, although it has no obvious bearing on the plot. Its importance becomes clear at the end, when Hildred sees his accomplice throwing himself into the Lethal Chamber, which is his signal that Hawberk and Constance are dead. In addition, Hildred foreshadows his murderous intent early in the story when he tells his doctor that he will “get even with him for his mistake” (3) and will wait for the right opportunity. This holds true at the end when Hildred kills, or at least claims to kill, the doctor.
Foreshadowing also appears in the second story, “The Mask,” in the form of several scenes featuring the special chemical formula Boris Yvain has devised. The third-person narration describes the process of placing a living thing in the solution to turn it into marble with exquisite detail in the first scene. Then in the scene when Boris and Alec are teasing each other and rough-housing, Boris’s near mistake in throwing Alec into his shallow pool full of the solution heavily foreshadows the later moment when Genevieve throws herself into it on purpose.
Other instances of foreshadowing include: the dreams Tessie has about the churchyard guard driving the hearse in “The Yellow Sign,” signaling their eventual deaths at the end of the story; and Jack Trent’s assurances to Sylvia in “The Street of the First Shell,” that the shells falling on Paris will not hit the Latin Quarter, after which a shell does in fact land in the Latin Quarter.
Foreshadowing creates patterning which plays on reader expectations. The author can create suspense by setting up these expectations, or create surprise by confounding them. In horror and gothic stories which contain supernatural elements, foreshadowing can also lead to a sense of foreboding or inevitability and explore ideas of fate: when Tessie dreams about the hearse, she foreshadows the outcome of the story but, once the story has concluded, her dream can be seen as starting the chain of events that lead inexorably to that conclusion.
Setting
Setting, the physical place in which a narrative is set, is important in several of the stories in “The King in Yellow.” The stories are all set in either France or New York City, both places that Chambers lived. Two stories are set in New York City, one story is set in the countryside of Brittany in northwest France, and the rest are all set in Paris.
The majority of those set in Paris are the Latin Quarter, an affordable neighborhood known for its bohemian and creative atmosphere, populated by relatively poor students (often expatriates), and those pursuing artistic careers. Readers of the time would have understood the setting of the Latin Quarter to be expressive of decadent, wild, and immoral lifestyles. This image of the Latin Quarter, and its occupants, as immoral, excessive, and decadent was a common cliche of the time. Young American men living in Paris as students would also have had relative wealth and be able to live outside the usual confines of their families and society. Chambers’s choice of setting also plays an important role in supporting the theme of Decadence and Moral Decay.
As Chambers lived and studied as an art student in the Latin Quarter, it is fitting that so many of his stories are set there, and feature art students as the central characters: his understanding of the location and lifestyle lend verisimilitude to his stories, many of which draw on close detail. The French settings are also expressive of mystery and exoticism, and create an atmosphere of glamor and strangeness, at time when relatively few English speakers, particularly Americans, travelled to continental Europe. The use of a foreign location is a common device in gothic and horror literature as it allows the author to introduce elements of the unknown and to create a world where the normal rules of experience may not apply.
