the trip of le Horla summary
Answers
“The Horla,” a story almost as famous as “The Necklace,” is often considered the first sign of the syphilis-caused madness that eventually led to Maupassant’s death. As a story of psychological horror, however, it is actually the pinnacle of several stories of madness with which Maupassant had experimented previously.
The narrator begins considering the mystery of the invisible, the weakness of the senses to perceive all that is in the world, and the theory that if there were other senses, one could discover many more things about the reality that surrounds human life. Another predominant Maupassant theme here is that of apprehension, a sense of some imminent danger, a presentiment of something yet to come. This apprehension, which the narrator calls a disease, is accompanied by nightmares, a sense of some external force suffocating him while he sleeps, and the conviction that there is something following him.
This sense of something existing outside the self but not visible to the ordinary senses is pushed even further when the narrator begins to believe that there are actual creatures who exist in this invisible dimension. This conviction is then developed into an idea that, when the mind is asleep, an alien being takes control of the body and makes it obey. All of these ideas lead easily into the concept of mesmerism or hypnotism; under hypnosis, it seems as if an alien being has control of an individual’s actions, of which, upon awakening, he or she has no awareness. Although the narrator doubts his sanity, he also feels that he is in complete possession of all of his faculties, and he becomes even more convinced that an invisible creature is making him do things that his own mind does not direct him to do. Thus, he finally believes that there are Invisible Ones in the world, creatures who have always existed and who have haunted humankind even though they cannot be seen.
The final event that persuades him of the external, as opposed to the psychological, existence of the creatures is a newspaper article about an epidemic of madness in Brazil, in which people seem possessed by vampire-like creatures that feed on them during sleep. He remembers a Brazilian ship that sailed past his window and believes that one of the creatures has jumped ship to possess him. Now he knows that the reign of humanity on earth is over and that the forces of the Horla, which humankind has always feared—forces called spirits, jinn, fairies, hobgoblins, witches, devils, and imps—will enslave the world.
Finally, he “sees” the creature in the mirror when its presence blurs his own image by coming between him and the mirror. He decides to destroy the creature by locking it in his room and burning his house to the ground. As he watches the house burn and realizes that his servants are burning too, he wonders if indeed the Horla is dead, for he considers that it cannot, like a human being, be prematurely destroyed. His final thought is that, since the Horla is not dead, he will have to kill himself; the story ends with that decision.