With most of the stories we've read, the underlying message seems to be that humanity is irrelevant to the Deep Ones and the universe in general; that we are totally powerless and meaningless to the greater cosmic order.  In Dagon, we see one of the Deep Ones throw itself onto a religious idol and praise it, showing just how much there is that is greater than ourselves - to the extent that there is a level of Deep Ones even higher than the ones we see in the stories, that the ones we see worship much in the same way the cultists worship Cthulhu.  In The Doom That Came to Sarnath, we see Bokrug the Water Lizard exact his revenge on the people of Sarnath - but he does so in a way that implies many things about the nature of the Deep Ones; the fact that Bokrug is able to wait around for a millennium illustrates how much shorter and feebler our lives our compared to the Deep Ones, but also that our transgressions against them mean almost nothing to them.  Bokrug doesn't immediately take action against the people of Sarnath.  He can afford to wait a thousand years just to be extra petty and strike back on one of the most important days of the civilization's existence.  In all of the stories we read, we are constantly reminded of our total inadequacy and irrelevance in the cosmic order.

And yet, why is it that Cthulhu requires humans to perform a ritual when the stars are all aligned?  If he is truly as powerful a being as we are led to believe, then why is he reliant on us to release him?  And why is a human able to defeat him by simply ramming a boat into him?  If humans are so irrelevant in the cosmic order, then why are we so critical in The Call of Cthulhu - both as the catalysts for Cthulhu's rise and as the thing that keeps him from reattaining his full power?  The Call of Cthulhu goes entirely against what Lovecraft has been conditioning us to believe with his other stories, so we are left to wonder what the implications of this story are.  Are we to believe what he says in TCOC over what he says in Dagon, TDTCTS, and his other stories?  Or are the messages in both equally valid?