Darkness Visible A Memoir Of Madness Analysis
In the memoir, Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness, author William Styron chronicles his descent into depression, from the point when he first recognized the seriousness of his situation, through months of increasing despair, darkness, and blank helpless dependency, and then, after crisis, to wellness.
Styron’s stirring depiction of what it feels like to have your life force slowly but surely engulfed by a profound melancholia acknowledges that no one on the outside will ever know what the weight of such enormous sadness feels like. “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self –to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible …show more content…
Styron tells of his almost seven-week stay in the hospital, and the routine and of therapy, and the insights gained. “After I began to recover in the hospital it occurred to me to wonder – for the first time with any really serious concern - why I had been visited by such a calamity.” (77)
It isn’t until the end of the account that Styron speaks to potential life events and genetic predisposition to mental illness and the possibility of experiencing mental illness before the events outlined at the onset of the book. Styron recounted a trip he took to Paris to accept a prestigious literary award wherein he became aware of the life-threatening dimension of his worsening depression. “After I had returned to health and was able to reflect on the past in the light of my ordeal, I began to see clearly how depression had clung close to the outer edges of my life for many years. Suicide has been a persistent theme in my books...I was stunned to perceive how accurately I had created depression...describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance that led them to destruction. Thus depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for
Styron’s stirring depiction of what it feels like to have your life force slowly but surely engulfed by a profound melancholia acknowledges that no one on the outside will ever know what the weight of such enormous sadness feels like. “Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self –to the mediating intellect – as to verge close to beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible …show more content…
Styron tells of his almost seven-week stay in the hospital, and the routine and of therapy, and the insights gained. “After I began to recover in the hospital it occurred to me to wonder – for the first time with any really serious concern - why I had been visited by such a calamity.” (77)
It isn’t until the end of the account that Styron speaks to potential life events and genetic predisposition to mental illness and the possibility of experiencing mental illness before the events outlined at the onset of the book. Styron recounted a trip he took to Paris to accept a prestigious literary award wherein he became aware of the life-threatening dimension of his worsening depression. “After I had returned to health and was able to reflect on the past in the light of my ordeal, I began to see clearly how depression had clung close to the outer edges of my life for many years. Suicide has been a persistent theme in my books...I was stunned to perceive how accurately I had created depression...describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance that led them to destruction. Thus depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for