Madness: Godly Experience Gone Wrong

The controversial topic of insanity manifests itself commonly in Romantic writing, and has been one much disputed over time. Some say that people who seem crazy are so above our own level of thought and understanding that we can’t possibly begin to identify with them and that we can find genius in the form of ordinary lunatics who connect to God and divinity in ways “normal” people don’t comprehend. Throughout works such as “The Cask of Amontillado and “The Castaway”, the authors question insanity with ideas that show the possible outcomes when one looks deep inside themselves for a divine spark or intuition. Both of these stories address madness in different forms, and madness itself is Godly experiences gone wrong; the person who receives the divine vision is unable to handle its raw truth.

As we immerse ourselves into Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”, a powerful story of a man’s vengeance with “impunity”, we find that the narrator’s revenge was merely a materialization of his sinister, unrestricted human nature. The author vividly describes the resentment that the narrator feels towards the man who insulted him, and the lengths he goes to for revenge. Montressor, the narrator, swears retribution for Fortunato, whose “thousand injuries…[he] had borne as best [he] could, but when [Fortunato] ventured upon insult, [he] vowed revenge” (Poe). While the scheme sinuously progresses, Montressor thinks and acts with a certain lunacy that one cannot help but notice. Generally speaking, people wouldn’t resort to murder for simply a case of a rude, insolent offender, but the narrator has found himself looking deep inside, and what he finds is a malicious soul that wishes to harm those who have insulted him. He crafts a plan...

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... are so sure of their own destiny and God’s plan. God in mysterious, no human who hasn’t been exposed to God’s will has confirmation as to what the truth is, and one could say that it will be something so unbelievable, people can’t even begin to imagine the truth. For this reason, Pip is unable to entirely accept what God exposes to him in the ocean.

Throughout the world and the history of human’s existence, the nature of God and ourselves has been questioned constantly. Everywhere we turn, we see Insanity in our society today, and it’s interesting to give it a second thought, to wonder what it really means to be mentally unstable. As long as the universe goes on, living people may never know the answer; all we can do is form opinions, think, imagine, wait, listen, and develop sensitivity to all of our surroundings, where truth could be hiding anywhere, in anyone.