Deconstructing Madness in Crime and Punishment and Don Quixote

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 …

…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.