Madness Mantra / Literature

Madness Mantras… Madness Mantras… Madness Mantras… Madness Mantras… Madness Mantras… in literature.

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• Charles Dickens used these.
  • In A Tale of Two Cities, an old letter relates the story of a woman who has gone mad with grief and stress, and can only repeat, "My husband, my father, and my brother!... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, hush!"
  • There is also the little old lady in Bleak House who has been driven mad by the Chancery Court's failure to settle her case: "I am expecting a judgment shortly... on the Day of Judgment."
• Stephen King:
  • The Tommyknockers features "Late last night and the night before... Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door..."
  • IT features a mental patient repeatedly singing just one line from a Doors song. "Try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire, try to set the night on fire...".
  • The Stand:
    • One of the prisoners left to starve in Phoenix Jail adopts "MOTHER!" as his madness mantra, and doesn't stop shouting it until Lloyd Henreid screams back "Your mother's in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana!" (Sadly, the "Mother" shouter starts back up again not too long after.)
    • Lloyd has his own Madness mantra a little later, when he's still locked up and so hungry he's contemplating cannibalism. As he's trying to reach for the arm of the guy the next cell over, he has the song "Camptown Races" stuck in his head, and keeps idly singing the one nonsense bit of the chorus, and nothing else, over and over: "Doo-dah...doo-dah..."
    • Donald Elbert, a mentally-unstable pyromaniac better known as the "Trashcan Man", is a nigh-religious follower of Randall Flagg, often shouting "My life for you!" in the television series.
    • There's also the case of what Larry calls "the monster-shouter," someone he hears repeatedly screaming in the streets of an empty New York City, "Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! Monsters coming now!" Later, Larry and Rita find him stabbed to death. (He's memorably played in the miniseries by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.)
  • In Pet Sematary, Lou Creed becomes fixated on the line "Hey! Ho! Let's Go!" from the Ramones' Blitzkrieg Bop as he becomes more and more unhinged. Stephen King seems to really like this trope.
  • He included it near the end of his short story "Crouch End", too: after losing (in a very literal sense of that word) her husband to something that lives in Crouch End, the central character takes to crawling to the back of her closet and writing, over and over, "Beware the Goat with a Thousand Young".
  • In "And Cain Rose Up", a school sniper repeats "GOOD GOD LET'S EAT".
  • In Rose Madder, as Norman chases Rosie and Bill into the painting and his Ferdinand the Bull Mask fuses to his head, he takes to repeating "Viva ze bull".
  • The Shining again, which featured "redrum" backwards for "murder".
  • The most unnerving King example may be from his short story "The Jaunt". "Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!"

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• H. P. Lovecraft's novel At the Mountains of Madness:
  • When the nameless Narrator and his colleague Danforth leave the city of the Elder Things in the mountains of Antarctica via airplane, one of them glances over the mountain range and sees... something, which causes him to scream like a madman and begin repeating the phrase "Tekeli-li" over and over again (in reference to the story Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, and also used to describe the whistling sound the Elder Things made and which the shoggoth are mimicking). What exactly he sees he never tells to the narrator, except in disjointed phrases such as "Yog-Sothoth", "The Black Pit", "The Elder Pharos", "Proto-Shoggoths" and "The First, the Last and the Immortal".
  • Also, a bit earlier, when they see the multi-eyed amorphous mass of a Shoggoth and they are running for their lives, an insane Danforth starts singing "South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under - Kendall - Central - Harvard -" and so on, reciting the familiar underground stations between Boston and Cambridge as a monstrous analogy to how the shoggoth emerged from the mists towards them like an underground train emerging from the darkness of a tunnel.
• Caliphate: Petra experiences an inner thoughts version of this trope when she is gangraped by Fundail and his friends. All she can think is "It isn't me. It isn't me. It isn't me".
• In Cat and Mouse by James Patterson when Thomas Pierce is exposed as Mr. Smith, he starts repeating: I MURDERED ISABELLA CALAIS AND I CAN'T STOP THE KILLING. The first sentence is spelled out in his victims' initials. The second would have been.
• Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • The Giant, Longwrath, of the Third Chronicles: "Slay her! Are you fools!"
  • And in the Second Chronicles, Covenant himself with "Don't touch me." But he wasn't really insane, just catatonic, and quoting himself from First Chronicles. This mantra underscored how, as a leper, he was cut off from all human contact. The other mantra from this book was "It isn't catching," to ram home that there was no real reason for everyone to avoid him.
  • Then, when she temporarily takes the spell causing his coma into herself, Linden Avery comes out with her own mantra, "You never loved me anyway". This refers to her rather dysfunctional relationship with her parents (culminating with her father suiciding in front of her, and her later Mercy Killing her sick and useless mother) and her subsequent lack of emotional connection.
• The Cosmere:
  • In Elantris, this is how residents of the eponymous city can tell when one of them has finally become "Hoed", meaning they have succumbed to their injuries and are insane beyond recovery. This happens because the Elantrians are stuck in a unfinished transformation, resulting in their injures never healing at all, compounding until they are overwhelmed by constant pain.
  • The Stormlight Archive book 2, Words of Radiance: Talenel'Elin, Herald of War, does nothing but constantly repeat a dozen lines warning the people about the coming Desolation. He does this constantly for weeks. This is a result of the Honor Pact where he was sent to Damnation alone (instead of with the other 9 Heralds) where he endured roughly 4,500 years of torture. What he had to say would probably help a lot more if his dialect wasn't out of date. He does manage to break out, at least momentarily during Oathbringer.

• Discworld:
  • "Millennium hand and shrimp!" (Admittedly, usually as part of a longer, fairly random rant. Still occasionally repeated, though.)
  • Making Money: Vetinari Vetinari Vetinari Vetinari... (A written example, but still!)
  • The villain of Men at Arms, driven mad by the power of the Gonne to extinguish lives, has "It was like being a god" as his internal monologue Madness Mantra.
• In Doom, some of the zombies can speak but all that comes out is ominous gibberish about the Gates, "Great Ones", and death.
• Evillious Chronicles:
  • Cloture of Yellow: Germaine's breakdown upon finding her father murdered.
    It's not Dad. My father is not dead. He can't be. He can't be. He can't be. It's not Dad. It's not my dad. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not, it's not my dad it can't be it can't be it can't be it can't be-
  • Gift From the Princess Who Brought Sleep: Throughout the novel, each chapter ends a segment of Margarita Blankenheim's narration, showing her deteriorating mental state. At the end of the novel, she is just repeating "I am the Sleep Princess" over and over.
• At the start of the Anthony Trollope novel An Eye for an Eye, we are introduced to a madwoman who incessantly repeats "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Is that not the law?" The rest of the book is a flashback that explains what made the woman go mad.
• In Fate/Zero, after having her right hand cut off by Maiya to remove the Command Spells she forcibly got from Kayneth, Sola-Ui starts repeating "My right hand... my hand..." all over. These are also part of her last words.
• GONE: Caine Soren has the mantra: Hungry in the dark... This is lampshaded by Diana:
  Caine: Hungry in the dark... HUNGRY IN THE DARK!!!
  Diana: Not this again.
  Caine: [snaps out of it] What?
  Diana: It's one of your greatest hits.
• In The Good Soldier, Nancy goes insane because of Leonora's treatment of her and Edward's suicide and can say nothing but a Latin phrase meaning "I believe in an omnipotent God" and the word "shuttlecocks."
• In The Great Divorce, two of the souls in Hell have tracked down Napoléon Bonaparte, who can do nothing anymore but pace around chanting "It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the English. It was the fault of the Russians."
• Harry Potter:
  • Subverted in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where Sirius Black murmured "He's at Hogwarts" over and over while in prison. As it turns out, this mantra actually kept him sane.
  • Played straight in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which Morfin Gaunt says "He'll kill me for losing his ring". This was apparently all Morfin said when he was arrested, as he was horrified that Marvolo's ring was missing (the young Voldemort had stolen it as a trophy). According to Dumbledore, he said nothing else for the rest of his life.
• Heralds of Valdemar: A minor character in the Collegium Chronicles is driven insane by Valdemar's vrondi-powered anti-magic shield.^note The Healers told his boss to get that man out of Valdemar, but did he listen? During his last on-page appearance, he's repeating a verse over and over in an apparent attempt to keep the vrondi away from him.
  …and all the things that are not there, they flock and fly and stare and stare, and all their eyes are big and bright and burn away the dark of night, and there is nowhere left to hide, they're everywhere, they get inside, and even though they are not there, they're watching watching everywhere, and more and more come every day, oh gods I wish they'd go away, and all the things that are not there, they flock and fly and stare and stare…
• The Hunger Games: Wiress is already not quite right in her mind, but after enduring a blood rain trap in the 75th Hunger Games, she is reduced to muttering "tick tock" over and over. Katniss eventually realizes that it's a clue: the arena is shaped like a clock.
• In House of Leaves, Johnny Truant's mother is in a mental hospital. Her correspondence to her son reflects this clearly, as she starts repeating certain phrases over and over in her letters. In the Holloway tapes, we hear Holloway chanting, "I'm Holloway Roberts. Born in Menomonie, Wisconsin..."

• Uriel of Knights of the Borrowed Dark is left repeating, "I need to speak to Edifice Greaves," after Ambrel is killed on the journey to parley with the Knights, as that's what he was told to say by Denizen. He snaps out of it eventually.
• In John Ajvide Lindqvist's first novel Let the Right One In, one boy who gets locked in a basement with the monster (well, one of them) is found hiding in a corner, reciting the Swedish equivalent of "One Elephant Went Out to Play". By the time people find him, the number of elephants on that spider web is somewhere in the hundreds.
• Lolita: There's a small chapter describing the inability to think straight, before quickly descnding into thoughts of Lolita. Her name is repeated ten times, and is followed by "Repeat till the page if full, printer."
• Lone Wolf: "Tick, tick, tick, tick, You're touched by the colours and the colours stick."
• The Ray Bradbury short story "The Long Rain" is about a group of men on the perpetually rainy planet Venus, searching for one of the dry "sun domes" that have been built there. One man recalls that an old friend of his snapped after being on Venus too long, and was found wandering around repeating, "Don't know enough, to come in, outta the rain. Don't know enough, to come in, outta the rain. Don't know enough—"
• The eighth book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen has Mad Artist Kadaspala who manages to combine Talkative Loon and this. It's not that he makes no sense, he just takes ages to get to the point as he turns almost anything he says into a Madness Mantra that first had to pass through an insanity filter.
  "But you but you but you are the knot the knot. Snapping tight! No one gets away. No one gets away. No one gets away. Hold still hold still and hold still until he awakens and he will awaken and so he will. Awaken. My child. The word, you see, the word is the word is the word. The word is kill."
• The Misfit of Demon King Academy: In the source material when Anos forcibly turns Emilia Lud(o)well into a hybrid and makes her realize the pickle he placed her in, she starts incoherently saying "a lie..." in repeated fashon as she checked the blood of her new body over and over before she snaps and quickly swipes Anos's sword in a suicide attempt.
• In The Name of the Wind Master Elodin leads Kvothe through the University's insane asylum; he tries to demonstrate how in over his head Kvothe is by opening one of the soundproof doors. Immediately the hallway fills with incessant screams of "THEY'RE IN ME THEY'RE IN ME THEY'RE IN ME!"

• In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ruckly, one of the Chronics, responds to everything by mumbling "Fffffuuck da wife".
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service: "We have all the time in the world. We have all the time in the world."
• There is one at the end of Alexander Pushkin's short story The Queen of Spades. Herman thought he gained a secret magic combination of winning cards, but he lost his property in his gamble. He was confined to a mental asylum, constantly murmuring: "Tray, seven, ace! Tray, seven — queen!"

• In A Shadow Girls Summer Of Love And Madness Nomie is unable to comprehend that Richard is not a good person and repeats it automatically whenever it is pointed out.
• George R. R. Martin's "The Skin Trade" has a minor example, after P.I. Randi insists (despite strong recommendations against it) on examining the body of a murder suspect who died similarly to her own father. For the rest of the day, the only thing she can say is repetitions of "It was Roy Helander, and he was wearing Joanie's skin."
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Theon Greyjoy has: "Reek, Reek, it rhymes with..."
  • Also from Theon Greyjoy is "(S)He needs to know (her) his name.";
  • Arya's prayer might fit: "Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei." She's not insane, but it seems to have become a compulsive behavior by the end of the last book;
  • Mad King's last words: "Burn them all. Burn them all. Burn them all. Burn them all. Burn them all. Burn them all. Burn them all.";
  • Oberyn Martell goes berserk in his battle with The Mountain while trying to get him to confess to killing his sister and her children. "You raped her! You murdered her! You killed her children!";
  • Patchface sings a lot of creepy and strangely foreshadowing songs but his scariest and most common is "The shadows come to dance, my lord... The shadows come to stay, my lord...";
  • Tyrion is haunted by his father Tywin's snarking reply before killing him that his first wife Tysha has gone "Wherever whores go";
  • Ned Stark's POV shows how his sister Lyanna's last words - "Promise me, Ned..." - have taken a notable toll on his mental health in the fourteen years that have already passed.
  • Daenerys' saying "If I look back, I am lost" teeters between this and a Survival Mantra.
• A pseudo-example in Perelandra, the second book in The Space Trilogy, the Un-Man taunts the hero, Ransom, by saying his name over and over to annoy him.
• Star Wars Legends: Although he doesn't say it out loud, Grand Moff Tarkin has one of these for about two seconds at the end of Death Star during a Villainous Breakdown. It went "Unthinkable. Unthinkable - boom." (Since it's the end of a book called Death Star, you can guess where the boom came from.)

• In The Westing Game, a story is told about two boys who went into Westing's mansion. It is mentioned that one boy ran out and he kept repeating "purple waves, purple waves".
• In The Wheel of Time Rand al'Thor keeps itemizing all the women for whose deaths he makes himself responsible for. Seeing as he makes himself responsible for the death of everyone even remotely connected to him, commanding hundreds of thousands and fighting a war for the further existence of creation it becomes quite long.
• In The Yellow Bag, when Alberto becomes fixated on opening Raquel's bag during "Lunch", he constantly repeats the phrase "I'm going to peek inside that bag, to see what's in there".

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