Lets say your family owns a restaurant. Your great grandfather emigrated from Italy with nothing but his father’s pocket watch, the shoes on his feet, and a dream to open his own authentic Italian restaurant. After working at a butcher shop and saving every penny, he finally got the chance to open up his own restaurant at the age of 40. Ever since, the restaurant has been owned and run by your family. Your father owns it now, and you’ve worked there since you were a little kid. But, you want to move to Las Angeles to pursue your dreams to be an actor. You have just shared this with your family. Every morning you pull your chair up to scowls and grunts. Your mom stops making you breakfast, and your brother receives all of the high praise because he loves the restaurant. Your father stops talking to you. You feel ashamed.

“Just because it’s always been that way, does that make it right?” Says the Madman from Diary of a Madman, by Lu Xun. The Madman’s theory of believing everyone around him is a cannibal is a stretch, but what I believe Lu Xun is getting at here is that people need to stop being afraid to think differently from the mass population.

The Madman believes everyone is against him, and plans to eat him. The only reason The Madman initially believes this is true is because he sees people in the village looking at him angrily. Of course, he reads a history book that, between the lines, seemed to have told him that cannibalism has been occurring throughout history to this very day. But we are going to stick to the initial reason for now. The main reason the hypothetical situation in the introduction made you feel ashamed is because the people around you started to treat you differently. All of the people you’ve known your entire life and have loved and raised you don’t like your decision to follow your dreams of becoming the next Leonardo DeCaprio. You are breaking tradition.

What if the Madman has thoughts that he did not share with us? He says in the first diary entry “I’ve got reason for my fears,” but does not exclaim what those fears are.

To cover the confusion as to why he ends the last entry with “save the children” is because his initial stages of paranoia came from thinking fathers and mothers taught their children to hate him. So, mothers and fathers are passing tradition down to their children to hate this man that they don’t even know.

Lu Xun creates this sense of madness to convey to the reader that just because a person may think differently from others, and those thoughts might be breaking tradition, that person is not mad. You should not think that you are mad just for thinking differently.