Doctor Zhivago Madness Quotes

After her affair with Komarovsky, Lara takes a job with the Kologrivov family to make some money. But pretty quickly, life just seems to have too many moving parts for her. By the end of it all, she just wants to settle down, get married, and have a nice quiet life. But before she can do that, she goes through a period of feeling like she's totally insane, which of course culminates in her attempt to murder Komarovsky.

If it weren't for his daily habits and responsibilities, Zhivago would totally lose his mind. It always helps to have something in your life to keep you grounded. The problem is that Zhivago eventually starts to resent the very things that keep him sane. He ends up abandoning his family and spending all his time writing, which just makes him more and more eccentric as he gets older.

The expression "mad for joy" in this passage might seem like a figure of speech. But when you look at it in context, you realize that Zhivago has done certain things in this book that have made us question his sanity. For this reason, we're forced to entertain the possibility that the thought of seeing Lara literally makes Zhivago insane with happiness. Love as madness, at any rate, is an age-old theme in literature.

We've all heard more than once about the brutality of war. But this brutality is shoved in our faces when we're forced to listen to Pasternak describe a guy who has had one leg and one arm chopped off by an enemy army. To make things worse, the guy has had to crawl several miles back to his camp in order to deliver a message of warning to his army. In this case, we truly catch a glimpse of how insane people can get during times of violent conflict.

When Zhivago is lying in bed with a brutal fever, he begins to think that he is falling into madness, which is one of the last stages he'll pass through before dying. In his madness, he curses heaven for abandoning him the way it has. But as we find out later, Zhivago totally gets over his illness and wakes up in the arms of his lover, Lara. Fate seems to work on its own terms.

Lara realizes that her husband Pasha has gone mad and turned into a warmongering murderer. But at the same time, she holds out hope that one day he'll regain his sanity. And if that day ever comes, she swears that she'll go running back to him, because she loves him that much. It's kind of weird, though, that she tells this to Zhivago while they're living together as husband and wife.

Zhivago realizes that it's insane for him and Lara to return to the abandoned village of Varykino because they'll never survive an entire winter there. But that kind of sane, long-term thinking isn't a big part of their lives anymore. How can it be, when everything around them is so crazy? All they really care about is living in freedom a few days more, so they end up going to Varykino anyway.

While living with Lara in Varykino, Zhivago can't help but feel like he's living in a state of quiet madness. By this, he means that he's living a life that cannot possibly have a future. He's living without any sort of sane plans or a sane reason for living. He just keeps going on in survival mode. Without some higher purpose beyond sheer survival, Zhivago finds life to be nonsensical and insane.

After Lara leaves Varykino, Zhivago truly loses the last thing keeping him connected to the real world. With her gone, all he does is write poetry. He doesn't even bother to shower or shave, but just lets himself and the house around him go to ruins.

In a world where no one can say what they're actually thinking, it's hard for anyone to stay sane. The problem is that the Revolution has created such a strong sense of group responsibility that no one is willing to express themselves as an individual with individual thoughts. And in Zhivago's (and Pasternak's) mind, this is a sort of madness on a huge social level.