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Theme Of Insanity In Gothic Literature

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A simple way to make someone holding a gun scarier than it already is, would be to make the person insane while holding a gun. Insanity does things to people, horrible things which are present in gothic literature which I will be talking about. “Ghost Story” by Seamus Deane is about a woman that becomes insane after taking care of demonic children whose parents died. “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe is about a man who kills the older man he cares for. “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs is about a family who try to use a supernatural object to gain wealth but discover that in doing so it takes something away from them. Insanity is used to aid in character development in the stories “Ghost Story”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Monkey’s Paw.” In “Ghost Story” by Seamus Deane, insanity is used to develop the babysitter as a character because at the beginning she was sane, at the end she went insane. The author did this to show how the children changed her. After the girl returns home, she stops …show more content…

The narrator, after having already murdering the old man, explains why he is not mad for killing the man. In his words, “If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body” (Poe 4). What the narrator later tells us was how he buried the body under floorboards. That emphasizes just how insane he is to believe that he himself really is not insane. The author is trying to get the readers to, in a way, to have fear and be on the edges of their seats because of this narrator. We really do not know what the narrator will do next because he is insane, which is a good way of keeping the reader’s interest on the author’s

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