Madness and sanity seem to exist on opposite poles of a binary; one is defined by the absence of the other. However, this binary, though present in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, is problematic. The protagonists - who are meant to represent the mad extreme - straddle the line that separates sanity from madness, and they thus refuse to be so easily classified. While the authors demonstrate that such …
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showed last 75 words of 3289 total
…asocial behavior. This is illustrated particularly well in Raskolnikov's apocalyptic dream, in which the human race is infected by trichinae that make each person think "the truth [is] contained in himself alone," and as a result, they cannot " agree on what to regard as evil, what as good" (Dostoevsky 547). This dream shows the large-scale implications of such behavior. Similarly, Cervantes certainly presents a bitter side to knight errantry, especially in the melancholy that follows it.