Villanueva 1

Carla Villanueva
Professor Kane
English 115 mw
30 November 2016
Progression Exercise 3.2: Argument and Analysis
One of the major themes Susanna Kaysens Girl, Interrupted, illustrates is the fine line
between sanity and insanity, questioning if she was even ill to be sent to the hospital in the first
place. She argues that it is easy to slip into a parallel universe and that she and the other
patients are trapped in more than one parallel universe (Kaysen 5). Since it is so easy to slip into
an alternate reality, she doubts that her stay at the hospital was necessary. She believes
that sanity is a falsehood constructed to help the "healthy" feel "normal" in comparison. The staff
at McLean hospital is the ones with power in that institution and they view themselves as normal
because they are not the patients. The correlation between the perception of sanity and the
possession of power is that those in power can choose to what those who are lesser perceive as a
reality. In Platos The Allegory of the Cave, the ones in power were the ones who were able to
create the shadows from the fire making the individuals stuck in the cave believe those are the
only things that exist in reality.
However, there are some aspects that make Kaysens position seem wrong. One of these
elements would be her perception of time. The novel itself does not follow a linear chronological
order, but the time she spent in the doctors office for the evaluation differed by a great amount
of time. She recounts that the evaluation only lasted ten minutes, but the admission medical
records has it written down that it extended over three hours (13). She did write this memoir
about 25 years after these events occurred so it is reasonable to assume that she misremembered

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this, but ten minutes to three hours is too large of a difference for a sane person to make that
mistake.
At the McLean hospital is obvious that the staff are the ones who hold the power over the
patients. The do regular check-ups on them, making sure they are not harming others or
themselves, they control what type of medicine they take and when, and what privileges they get
to have. By having the power to grant privileges to the mental patients, that is how the staff
determine the least insane to the most insane. The patients that they grant the most privileges to
are the ones who are the closet to being sane since they can be trusted to some extent. However,
the ones who are the most insane would be the ones who have no privileges at all. The staff have
this kind of power to distinguish the sane and insane, holding themselves to the highest level of
sane.