How is a disturbed mind presented through the characters of Roger (Lord of the Flies) and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)?
There is one major point of comparison between Lady Macbeth and Roger which shows the major difference between them. This is the feeling of guilt. Unlike Roger, Lady Macbeth seems to feel some level of guilt, when she slowly loses sanity due to feeling guilt over the murder of Duncan, and the greed for power she can’t control. “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” This famous speech of Lady Macbeth’s clearly displays her minds’ path through extreme trauma and into insanity as she begins to feel remorse over what she has caused. However, although she begins to feel guilty this close to the end of the play, at the beginning of Act 5, she previously shows that she feels strongly that neither she nor Macbeth should feel any regret or guilt over the murder they had planned. In Act 3, scene 2, she abruptly tells Macbeth, “...what’s done is done.” She means for Macbeth to accept what he has done and not allow himself to hate it. These two points give the reader/viewer reason to wonder what her real thoughts are on the matter, and whether she really did turn insane throughout the course of the play or whether she was in fact not in her right mind from the start, as although her thoughts seem to suddenly change more frequently nearer the end of the play she displays signs of being unable to keep focused on the same points and ideas from quite early on. On the other hand, Roger never feels guilt over anything he does; or at least, he does not let his feelings be shown to the reader or any of the other characters. "High overhead, Roger, with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever.” He felt no remorse for the wrongs he was committing. All he really cared about in the end was the death of Piggy and the inevitable rule of Jack which would soon follow, with Roger being held in high regard by Jack. He seems to hold a different, more terrifying in some ways, kind of insanity to Lady Macbeth, as he will mindlessly kill without thinking of the consequences