Consumed by Compulsion

Mentally ill characters in literature wear masks. They conceal their madness. Like a court case, intricate details are revealed as the literature progresses, allowing the audience to discover who the character truly is. When reading about a mental illness such as anxiety the reader is exposed to the degree of madness that a character lives through. For instance, Aza Holmes from John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down suffers from severe anxiety, causing her to drink hand sanitizer so that she can truly be clean. This madness is real and exists inside and outside of Aza; it affects her relationships and it alters her life as well as her ability to function in society. Throughout the novel Aza’s anxiety is developed via Green implementing works of imagery and repetition that, similar to DePorte’s “Madness and Masquerade”, demonstrate a character spiraling out of control into an abyss of darkness and madness.

Aza, a teenage girl living in Indiana, suffers from anxiety. She has constant repetitive thoughts that she has C. diff, a bacterial infection. She always keeps a Band-Aid over her middle finger, and constantly picks at a callous until the callous becomes a wound. Aza’s daily reopening of the wound and applying band aids is an obsessive repetitive habit that the reader soon picks up on. Aza picks at her finger throughout the entire novel, and her thoughts about contacting C. diff consume her day, ranging from a slight urge in the back of her head to reapply a new Band-Aid, to terror that paralyzes Aza from thinking about anything except checking her finger. During an anxiety attack Aza is bombarded with thoughts, telling herself “Can’t stop thinking. Trying to find something solid to hold on to in this rolling sea of thought. Davis’s microbe-soaked tongue on your neck. Hospital gown clinging to your back soaked with sweat. And in the way-down deep, some me screaming, get me out of here get me out of here get me out please I’ll do anything” (Green 152). Green effectively creates a real disorder through a fictional character’s repetitive thoughts and fear about contracting a disease. Daily thoughts of fear and worry bombarding a character is a common technique of portraying madness. For instance, Moby Dick’s main character, Ahab, spends more than half of his life searching for a whale that not only took his leg away, but also his sanity. Ahab’s prosthetic leg is a constant reminder of what he has lost (DePorte 644). Like Aza, the repetitive anxious thoughts of the whale consume his every move. This is evidenced by Ahab telling his crew of sailors “To chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out” (DePorte 649). Ahab’s willingness to devote his entire life to finding a whale is a madness that is developed throughout the entire tale of Moby Dick. In a story of obsession, Ahab cannot do anything besides think of the whale (DePorte 644). His repetitive thoughts drive the plot, as due Aza’s. As the novel progresses, Aza fights to climb her uphill battle with anxiety. Green emphasizes this fight with Aza constantly thinking about C. diff, her continuous thoughts becoming a demon. When Aza is at a therapy session, she mentions that she had tried exposure response therapy, a type of therapy involving exposing a patient to their fear in order to help the patient overcome their fear, but it had not worked (Green 60). Green develops Aza’s mental illness with examples of her attempting to fix her madness. She goes to therapy, she takes medication, and she tries to avoid the constant desire to check the callous on her finger. While Aza does not overcome her anxiety at the end of the novel, Green still effectively creates a story about a girl and her madness through a gnawing, repetitive fear of contracting a bacterial infection.

While a movie has the benefit of playing music in the background to hint to the audience that a scene is important, novels do not have this advantage. Instead, authors have to convey the importance of their scenes through imagery. The specific degree of descriptive imagery that Green implements into the novel is what pushes Aza into being a girl with a true madness. As Aza describes her anxiety to her therapist she mentions, “I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my consciousness” (Green 58). This idea of an uncontrollable bus that takes Aza’s thoughts through blind turns and runs through red lights nails the key feature of Aza’s anxiety that Green is attempting to portray through the imagery: experiencing the loss of control. Aza’s thoughts wreak havoc without her consent. Continuing with the uncontrollable driving idea, consider DePorte’s explanation of the McNaughtan rule that conveys madness through convincing imagery. McNaughtan explains his motives for killing Sir Robert Peel’s secretary by telling the public, “They have driven me into a consumption” (DePorte 637). Similar to Aza, McNaughtan is unable to function in society due to intrusive thoughts. Each character suffers drastically from their madness, and each author portrays their descent into madness via imagery. Through multiple scenarios, such as when Aza first kisses Davis, Green reveals Aza’s anxiety spiraling further and further out of her control by writing with a metaphorical paintbrush, painting each anxiety-ridden scene. The reader is able to feel Aza’s anxiety during her panic attacks due to Green’s passionate imagery. This passion for imagery that Green has is shared by Shakespeare as well, in his play Hamlet. For instance, when DePorte analyzes Hamlet’s attempt to act mad by stating, “Hamlet seems to realize that his ‘antic disposition’ was not entirely put on” (DePorte 638). The use of the phrase “antic disposition” conveys a notion of an odd action. Shakespeare’s imagery is a tool that assists the plot in portraying Hamlet as who he really is. While Hamlet may convince others that he is sane on the inside, Hamlet is losing control of himself. He lost control during the murder and continues to lose control as the play progresses. Both Hamlet and Aza let their impulsivity control their actions. Similarly, both authors’ imagery lets the madness that formed from the impulsive actions bloom in its own, mad way.

Madness is not something easily curable such as pneumonia. At the end of the novel, Aza still has anxiety. She tells herself, one day while placing a fresh Band-Aid on her finger, “I would always be like this, always have this within me. There was no beating it. I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me. My self and the disease were knotted together for life” (Green 189). The constant application of Band-Aids to her finger are Green’s unique way of telling the audience that Aza does not overcome her anxiety. Anxiety is a repetitive madness; Aza’s life has been peppered with constant moments of fear and overthinking. However, her madness is effectively conveyed throughout the entire novel with the help of dramatic imagery that sends the reader spiraling through Aza’s intrusive thoughts along her side. The connections between Green and DePorte’s portrayals of madness allow readers to experience mental illness even if they are mentally healthy themselves. Not only in Green’s and DePorte’s storylines, but in our own lives as well we have been plagued with some sort of madness. Conversely, perhaps it is not our madness that defines us, but how we cope with our madness.

Works Cited

DePorte, Michael. “Madness and Masquerade.” The Georgia Review, vol. 44, no. 4, 1990, pp.      636–650. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41400095.

Green, John. Turtles All the Way Down. Penguin, 2018.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.