BBS Second Year English Business Communication
The Lunatic by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
Summary/Synopsis of the Poem The Lunatic by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
The speaker is angry with people of his society for calling him mad and taking him to Ranchi. He had only shown different behaviour. But now he accepts that he has become insane and takes a negative attitude. He can see the sound, hear the visual and taste the smell. He can touch the things that do not exist.
He sees flowers in stones shining in moonlight. In a rose, he can see the famous beauties like Helen and Padmini. He talks to moon birds, which the world cannot understand. In his math, one minus one is one. He has the sixth sense while the people have five. People run after money. But he tries to catch a dream. He likes thorn more than gold or diamond.
Mountains say something to him, and the blind are good guides for him. Like Diogenes, he challenges the king. He calls the king’s wine blood. So-called great and learned men of society are fools. So-called sages who leave society for penance are runaways. Their heaven is hell, their gold is iron and their development is decline.
He is angry to see leaders dancing on people’s backs, papers printing lies and tiger attacking deer. His brain is on fire. His anger against the society is going to burst like a volcano. He wants to rebel like Prometheus. He has become terrible.
Theme/Interpretation of the Poem The Lunatic by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
The speaker was wrongly charged by society as a madman because of his abnormal behaviour. This teaches us not to hurry in judging a person. The whole society might be wrong and a single person right. What the crowd says and does may not be always right. In human history, individuals going against society have given new direction.
Therefore, society needs to listen to what an individual says. Before declaring someone lunatic, we need to question how sane our actions are.
Devkota wears the mask of a lunatic for two reasons. First, he expresses his own strong personal reaction toward the evils in society. Secondly, he wants to comment on the hollowness of the so-called intellectuals of his time. He is not mad but rather abnormal, more imaginative and more learned than his contemporaries.
Thus, there is a contrast between his and the people’s views. There is irony in calling himself lunatic. Actually, the people are insane because their society is full of deception, inequality, injustice, exploitation, domination and other inhuman activities. Therefore, he has become angry and rebellious.
Short Analysis of the Poem The Lunatic by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
The speaker’s anger caused by society’s behaviour may be justified. But a mad person does not see the sound, hear the visual or taste the smell. Similarly, a madman doesn’t see flower in stone and beauties in flowers. He might have sixth sense. But how can we reject mathematical rules which are important findings to understand the world? It is natural that tiger eats a deer. Why does he reject natural rule?