Theme of Madness Essay

John Forbes Nash, Jr. once said, “In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.” When a person is effected by mental illness, they can experience grandiosity of the self, perturbed emotions, and a dissociation with the world around them. This is heavily detailed in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat.” The story follows a nameless narrator sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, as he begins to detail the events leading to her murder. He recalls his descent…

from madness” (244a). This is a quote from a dialogue written by Plato featuring Socrates and his friend, Phaedrus. It is spoken by Socrates in a second speech about the difference between a lover and a non-lover. In this speech he claims that choosing the non-lover over the lover should only be accepted if madness was intrinsically bad, if instead madness was given as the gift of the gods then one should choose the lover. The relationship between love and madness is that without divine madness…

characters, King Lear and Edgar Earl of Gloucester to the theme of madness and a search for self. Lear and Edgar experiences lead them to both lose their identities and become outcasts in their once familiar societies. A loss of reason changes the perception of how Lear and Edgar view outcasts and teach them about compassion and true love. The outcasts King Lear and Edgar both experience similar forms of family betrayal leading to their journey of madness in, which, they are forced to view the…

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. In one of Poe’s most frightening tales, the narrator, who has been sent to death by the Spanish Inquisition, narrowly escapes his demise multiple times. Through its exploitation of themes such as the negative side of human nature and madness, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum can be considered an example of dark romanticism. Transcendentalist writers, who were thriving at the same time as the dark romantics, often found their inspiration for…

beneficial as a physician due to the extreme characteristic. The control the husband has on the protagonist causes the depression to become severe. Ironic the loving husband trying to cure his wife actually ends up making the depression severe leading to madness. The protagonist after staring at the wallpaper for hours states “There is a recurrent spot where the patterns lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (79). Coming to the realization of someone trapped…

because Claudius killed him. The story revolves around Hamlet's dillema of how to kill his uncle while being deceptive enough so that no one finds out about the ghost. Shakespeare’s masterfully written tragedy, Hamlet, is wrought with tragedy and themes of revenge, but it is equally notable for the deception and lies that the players have towards each other. Throughout the play, characters hatch plans and spy on each other, creating a high tension mood. Shakespeare does this in order to add…

ENG 4U1 1 December 2015 Madness Creating Sickness and Disease in Denmark “Poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgment, without the which we are pictures or mere beasts”(Act 4.5.91-93). In this quote, King Claudius describes to his wife Gertrude, as Ophelia as being “divided from herself ” towards the end of the play. In other words, Ophelia is losing her mind. Although, what causes Ophelia to go mad? In William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”, the motif of madness caused by the feud of…

The Madness that Eats at the Heart Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” is one of the last poems that Poe wrote before he died. “Annabel Lee” is a poem about madness; the madness that Poe himself experienced when his wife was taken from him by scarlet fever. Since Poe felt the madness that is expressed in “Annabel Lee” he is able to create a mood of pure insanity from the narrator. He pulls a couple of tricks in order to create this feeling such as repetition and metonymy. The narrator also has a…

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a celebrated revenge tragedy which reflects the values and ideas of Renaissance Humanist era. The play depicts complexity through its interactions with themes such as revenge, verisimilitude, and madness. Also, the play’s structure, form, language, content are integrated together in order to create a text speaks in different ways. The play touches on the elaborate and every chasing forms of the human condition. Questioning basic human nature about life, death and…

drama hamlet, enjoys enduring value and relevance in a contemporary context by exploring universal themes such as, the exploration of gender roles, in the characters Ophelia and Gertrude; the journey into madness through the character Hamlet and the theme of power and corruption displayed by King Claudius. Through the techniques of dialogue, soliloquies and motifs, Shakespeare explores these themes by offering a unique insight into the political and sociocultural pressures that can plague…