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Herbert West, Reanimator
Howard Philip Lovecraft

Herbert West's madness
West is obviously mad as we can understand when the Dean of the Faculty kicks him out, or his repeated body stealing, his paranoia when he is startled by shadows and constantly looks over his own shoulder.
He is a perfectionnist, a megalomaniac who places his research above everything else. Sometimes he is selfish and paranoid ("he forbade me to touch the corpse and only trusted his own hand"), but more than this he primarily has an obsession that is both morbid and difficult to explain. He gives a pseudo scientific interest as a motivation, but it still does not hide that his deepest motivation (resulting from a trauma or fear of death?) is unknown but clearly related to his mental health.

West explains - and this really shows his obsession - that partial reanimations are not satisfactory because the bodies are not fresh enough although this condition is met (at least in the case of the boxer).
As for the results, West does not expect tales from beyond, but does not state what they are. He simply says that he is not satisfied by these creatures who bring a lot of trouble, are very violent and somehow smart. Paradoxically his goal is reached : bring them back to life.

He is really obsessed: the Faculty condones then forbids his experiments. he hopes that "the supreme goal is reached" and with "a growing fanatism" and the "zeal of the born scientist", he proceeds with his attempts of reanimation. He is described as "an ice-cold intellectual machine", his zeal brings him to a "morbid degenerescence" that leads him over time to "look with a hideous admiration at vigourous and intelligent men".

West manages to convince himself of the superior scientific interest of his research thanks to the use of scientific concepts and WORDS that make it possible for him to overcome his own taboos. He uses the word "specimen", "object", and uses the neutral "it". Looking at a sordid reality from a distance, he can use a cold and dehumanised eye, one of the key features of the mad scientist archetype, of which he is a perfect incarnation.

He uses stolen corpses, violated graves, therefore human bodies, and cremates them, adding insult to injury by refusing them the right to a grave (especially in the eyes of a reader of the 1920s).
This SCIENCE WITHOUT CONSCIENCE elements position Reanimator very close to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, among the best books of the category.

Herbert West goes through several phases. He starts by experiments on bodies taken at the university morgue, then steals his own corpses, then collects them on the battlefield of WWI, but he eventually kills a traveller.

The narrator, if he is telling the truth, is afraid and disgusted by Herbert West, and seems busy with escaping to justice. He admits he cannot forget what he saw and heard, and feeling hunted and followed, but he has no reasons to have remained at his duty for so long.
He is interested by "the tales from beyond", although "he does not believe in a soul". West's results, if they prove that reanimating the dead is possible and dangerous, prove nothing of the nature of death itself, except that it is apparently a biological state like any other (which was his goal in his younger age)

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