Insanity

Charles Dickens’ “The Signalman” and Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter”, two pieces of Gothic prose, are different yet, in various ways, similar. Written with the creation of suspense and tension in mind, both stories are tied with a common theme of insanity. One of the ways that the two writers create suspense is by utilising the description of the setting and the themes. Dickens reiterates the words “gloomy” and “dark” as well as mentioning that “so little sunlight ever found its way to…

Laertes seeks “revenge” on Hamlet after he loses his “noble father” and his sister is “driven into” insanity (Shakespeare 223-224). Ultimately, Laertes wants to kill Hamlet for everything he has done to his family. After finding out Hamlet kills his father, Polonius, and his sister commits suicide, Laertes is “unable to perceive and accept reality” (Bali…

that she felt she needed to live up to to become a good wife or even a good woman. Furthermore, those characters and even their expectations led to the worsening of the narrator’s depression and some even helped prod her into that final descent into insanity. This story took place during a time when a wife epitomized the term “submissive”. Wives…

What defines a murderer? Is it their motive, their state of mind, or how they executed their victims? There are numerous characteristics one could delve into, but those are the three that define the characters: Emily Grierson from “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and Montresor from “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. Montresor and Miss Emily Grierson, while both murderers, are two wholly different people, who went about killing their victims in extremely different ways. The…

Guilt and regret serve to cause and accelerate his deteriorating rationality and his overwhelming insanity. As the play progresses, the malicious killings and evil deeds, violate his morals alongside, letting his ambitions get the better of him, in which he forms a sense of guilt and regret, resulting in his guilty conscience. A representation of this…

Heart” exclaims that he “welcomed the gentlemen into his own house and that he desired the policemen to rest and stay a while” (Poe, 717) The fact that the man desired them to stick around the same place that he committed a brutal murder screams insanity. He wanted to feed his ego by convincing himself that there would be no way for the policemen to ever find him out. In the other story the mad narrator does the exact same thing. The narrator became so confident in his abilities that he had the…

committing a major crime result in a consequence like jail or being put in an asylum? People argue no because he is mental, he couldn’t help himself, and was “forced” to do it. They will probably just give him a warning or put him in a program to help his insanity curve down in terms of lethality. But as much as they argue, breaking a law, under any circumstance will result in a consequence of some sort, especially murder. He said that the eye was cursed, haunted, or dangerous to him. But in…

narrator who wasn’t credible or accurate with his narration. To create an unreliable narrator, Poe integrates hubris and insanity into his characters and selectively omits details. Firstly, Poe integrates insanity into his stories to…

development of a narration. Jane Eyre depicts Bertha Rochester as a lunatic without explaining how she becomes crazy; however, Wide Sargasso Sea justifies her by exposing the reader to the torture Mr. Rochester puts her through that leads to her insanity. Analyzing the differences between the two novels, specifically the change of Bertha’s physical appearance and the different portrayals of Bertha’s suicide, helps the reader understand how Bertha’s steady progression towards madness is due to…

the House of Usher, you might wonder what are some of the similarities between them. Will they were both written by Edgar Allan Poe. Both of the stories had the deaths of main characters. Also one person from each story went mad. In both stories insanity decides how the story ends. People close to Edgar Allan Poe died for example his wife and mother. To top it off he might have been there as a young child when his mother died. As you could imagine this was most likely traumatizing for him. Poe…