Fung 1
Jennifer Fung
Professor Shal
1211 Section 18
October 13th, 2013
The “Promethic” Illness
Circling a yellow wallpapered room, sticking your head in the oven, running wildly around town in the nude; these are the visions we associate with when the word madness comes to mind.
Entering the taboo world of mental illness, stigmatized as the crazy and psychotic by decades of misunderstanding, Marya Hornbacher takes a step towards reversing those damages by telling her own story in a memoir titled Madness: A Bipolar Life, in an attempt to shed some light and insight on the world of manic depression. She details her struggle with the disease that spawned multitudes of problems for her all throughout her life. To examine how she …show more content…

In opposition, she used the same technique to characterize her depressive state by employing short choppy sentences to convey a certain numbness.
I am crying too hard to hold the phone, so I hand it back to my aunt. Now I am in a car. The towering green-blue pines and rocky cliffs that crowed against the two-lane road go by. Now we are at a hospital. Now we are in a tiny, windowless room. Now I am in a chair. My aunt is here.
We are locked in. I do not understand the room. (127)
Although she utilized some adjectives, it is comparably less descriptive and much more factual based when put side-by-side with her comma spliced run on sentence. In fact it is so factual, there is almost a robotic quality to the author's tone.
Furthermore, she not only exerted structural manipulation for juxtaposition, she engaged the senses as well. “I peel up to the house on this quiet, still-sleeping street, gray wooden fences and lush vines crawling over them, and towering, brilliantly colored flowers glowing in the mist- this is the

Fung 4 terrifying outside world that threatens to swallow me whole” (123). She first paints a tranquil and friendly environment using vivid imagery loaded with adjectives like “quiet,” and “still-sleep” to suggest peace and “brilliantly colored” to convey a certain pleasantness. She goes onto describing her fear of such a calm and pleasant environment, employing an