I was wanting to talk more today about the themes found in stories patterned on the descent type of story we have been discussing. One of the characteristics I want to talk more about is the loss of rationality or the dissolving border between normal rationality and madness. Zaroff in "The Most Dangerous Game" says he has found the most dangerous game in an animal capable of reason, and yet, when Rainsford confronts him at the end of the story it is not as a rational animal, but as "a beast at bay"--he has lost (for the moment anyway) his reason.
For Jane, if that is the name of the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper," her actions appear to her to be perfectly reasonable, although to us they do not. However, we need to spend some time at the beginning of next class considering the other patterns of irrationality in the story.
Similarly in "The Secret Sharer" the moment when Leggatt is almost discovered pushes the narrator on the very brink of madness:
Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine? It was like being haunted. Motionless, with a grave face, he raised his hands slightly at me in a gesture which meant clearly, "Heavens! what a narrow escape!" Narrow indeed. I think I had come creeping quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border.
Are there other patterns of madness or irrationality in "The Secret Sharer"?
