Why Does Cthulhu Barely Appear in Lovecraft's Chronicles?

Cthulhu lends his name to the entire body of accounts this Archive catalogs, and yet he appears directly in exactly one chronicle: his own. In The Call of Cthulhu, R'lyeh rises briefly from the Pacific, Cthulhu emerges, is struck by the prow of the steamship Alert, dissolves into a formless mass, and sinks back beneath the waves with the city as it resubmerges. That is the entirety of his documented direct activity on file — a single chronicle, a matter of paragraphs.

He is referenced elsewhere only in passing — named, for instance, as Shub-Niggurath's "cousin" in the Necronomicon passage read aloud in The Dunwich Horror — but never again shown active. His outsized reputation owes considerably more to what has been built around the name since — retellings, rumour, and the cult's own persistence — than to how often he actually turns up across the fifty chronicles on file.