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Comparison Of Insanity In Hamlet And The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

483 Words2 Pages

“When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.”-George Bernard Shaw. Insanity is a process. No two minds are the same whether sane or insane. Toni Morrison shows insanity in The Bluest Eye as a slow process in which the main character loses their grasp on reality. In Hamlet, Shakespeare starts the book off with Hamlet off kilter and this insanity slowly grows throughout the course of the play. Both writers demonstrate insanity in very different ways yet the same purpose is fulfilled. The true purpose of insanity within writing is to cause conflict; from narrators unable to separate fantasy from reality to antagonists who cannot truly be reasoned with, insanity is a tool to perpetuate the conflict that allows the story to exist.

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, insanity is used toward the end of the book to show how toxic the racial prejudice is. Pecola was slowly driven insane over the course of the book until a single moment shattered her capacity to perceive reality as it truly is. Rather than seeing and hearing what is real she becomes paranoid and talks to herself as if she were another. “Quote about blue eyes goes here”. Pecola’s process of losing her sanity happened through no fault of her …show more content…

Hamlet himself could be called insane due to his depression, and his obsession with revenge. Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be”, shows off his depression, his want of death but inability to draw the blade on himself for fear that the end is worse than the now. Another quote of Hamlet’s, “With wings as swift / As meditation, or the thoughts of love,' he will 'sweep to [his] revenge.”, shows his dedication to vengeance. The ghost only he can speak to, the ghost that resembles his father, continues to push Hamlet to seek revenge, eventually causing Hamlet’s

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