Some summary: it's about a guy who stays at a boarding house who is extremely indeterminate. He doesn't tell anyone anything about who he is. He isn't very unique in terms of his physical appearances. And, he's a kind of random, unassuming sort of guy. Without spoiling the story for you, he simply "goes away" in the end. I won't tell you how.
I find this story extremely interesting. The protagonist is so anonymous. That is what I think his main characteristic is: anonymity. This is so interesting when one considers that specificity of character, setting, and time are what some would say defines the "novelistic" style. Sure, this is a short story, but it's still written in the "novelistic" or "realistic" style, if you will.
The first story from this anthology that I looked at is titled "The Grave," and it relates the story of a soldier in World War I who was buried alive and who tries to stay alive; and the main aesthetic effect of that story is confusion. He didn't know anything: was he going to be rescued? How many days had passed? Was the battle still raging?
Here you have a story where a character shows up, he's shrouded in mystery, and he disappears. And so, it's similar to the previous story in that the thematic preoccupation is "cognition" or "knowledge". The story depicts a protagonist who knows nothing; in the second story, we, as readers, know nothing.
I'm seeing a thematic preoccupation in Weird Tales with the unknown. Could these stories be thought of as thematically focused on unknowns?
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