There are numberless different ways to go insane in the world. Insanity is defined as the state of being seriously mentally ill. In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the song "Stan" the two narrators know personally how it is to go insane. In reading the passages: "The Yellow Wall Paper" and "Stan," in both pieces the narrator goes insane, however the way that they went mad was very different from each other. .
In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression, and is locked away in a room that eventually makes her go insane. When describing this room she immediately states how much she dislikes the wallpaper. At first she described the pattern as, "lame uncertain curves for a distance that suddenly commit suicide," (Stetson 648). This was the first red flag to anyone who read this story, it is unusual that someone compares the pattern of a wallpaper to someone committing suicide. Throughout the story, the narrator continues to talk about the wallpaper. She becomes obsessive. At one point in the story, she starts to see a woman in the wallpaper. The narrator now only thinks of the woman in the wallpaper, and the wallpaper itself. She starts to see the woman shaking the wallpaper as if she was trapped and was trying to get out. At the end of the story, the narrator hits her breaking point and decides to rip all of the wallpaper off the walls. When she frees the walls of the yellow wallpaper she says, "But here I can creep smoothly on the floor and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall so I cannot lose my way," (Stetson 656). This quote is explaining how the narrator thinks that she has now become part of the wall. She believes that becoming part of the wall was the solution to all of her problems and essentially let her free, however this is actually what led her to her breaking point.