Re: Classic stories about madness
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 28 June, 2018 04:10PM
Personally, I'm generally turned off by stories focusing on insane protagonists. "Oh: he's insane, okay, got it."
I'm much more interested in the governess in The Turn of the Screw as (what she pretty evidently is) a woman who took on much more than she was capable of managing, than the Edmund Wilson (I think it is) idea that the poor thing is simply hallucinating due to pathologically repressed longings.
I note btw that Lovecraft's stories are replete with narrators who assert that they are not insane, and/or that what they are about to relate could drive people (even the whole world) insane. But neither of these is the case. I suppose we could take it that the narrator of "The Rats in the Walls" has suffered some kind of mental breakdown and that the rats he seems to hear, in the story's present, are only in his mind. But isn't that about it, as regards Lovecraftian madness?