a question of degree

OK, so this is my first stab at an intro paragraph to my Literary Exploration paper about Madness. I know that I'm waiting a bit too long (the paper is due on Wednesday), but that's how I operate. Chia gets emails when I update, so hopefully he and the rest of my rabid fan base will approve.

Without further ado:

The definition of insanity is a very unclear one. The classic definition is “a severely disordered state of mind,” yet that definition has almost universally been unacceptable. To individual people, madness has its own definition, from “loving” to “being sane.” The cry that the insane are not as crazy as we think has been analyzed, pursued and reexamined, and that is not the goal of this paper*. The goal is to put forward a definition of madness as defined by works of literature. While there is no one definition for madness, several different literary works, namely: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, and Edgar Huntly: Or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockton Brown hold similar concepts of madness. That concept is that madness is the inability to distinguish between the mental and physical, especially in situations of pain. An insane mind reacts to a mental pain in a physical manner, treating it as a physical thing, without the ability to distinguish between the sadness of a loved one dying and the pain of a broken arm.



*I should note that I am not sure if referencing the paper by calling it "this paper" in the writing itself is OK, but that was the way that it came out.