Editing Idiot (section)

== In literature ==
A few authors have used "idiot" characters in novels, plays and poetry. Often these characters are used to highlight or indicate something else ([[allegory]]). Examples of such usage are [[William Faulkner]]'s ''[[The Sound and the Fury]]'', [[Daphne du Maurier]]'s ''[[Rebecca (novel)|Rebecca]]'' and [[William Wordsworth]]'s ''[[The Idiot Boy]]''. Idiot characters in literature are often confused with or subsumed within mad or lunatic characters. The most common intersection between these two categories of mental impairment occurs in the polemic surrounding [[Edmund (King Lear)|Edmund]] from [[William Shakespeare]]'s ''[[King Lear]]''.

In [[Fyodor Dostoevsky]]'s novel ''[[The Idiot]]'' the title refers to the central character [[Prince Myshkin]], a man whose innocence, kindness and humility, combined with his occasional epileptic symptoms, cause many in the corrupt, egoistic culture around him to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence. In ''[[The Antichrist (book)|The Antichrist]]'', [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]] applies the word "idiot" to [[Jesus]] in a comparable fashion, almost certainly in an allusion to Dostoevsky's use of the word:<ref>Michael Tanner and R.J. Hollingdale (1990). ''Glossary of Names in Nietzsche's "The Antichrist"''. Penguin Books. p 200</ref> "One has to regret that no Dostoevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting ''décadent''; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Nietzsche |first1=Friedrich |title=The Antichrist|date=1990 |publisher=Penguin Books |page=153 (§ 31)}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |first=Friedrich |last=Nietzsche |title=The Antichrist |author-link=Friedrich Nietzsche |year=1895 |url=http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/antich.html |quote=To make a hero of Jesus! And even more, what a misunderstanding is the word 'genius'! Our whole concept, our cultural concept, of 'spirit' has no meaning whatever in the world in which Jesus lives. Spoken with the precision of a physiologist, even an entirely different word would be yet more fitting here—the word idiot. |access-date=2007-09-21 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070923003622/http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/antich.html |archive-date=2007-09-23 |url-status=dead}}<br/>
(§ 29, partially quoted here, contains three words that were suppressed by Nietzsche's sister when she published The Antichrist in 1895. The words are: 'das Wort Idiot,' translated here as 'the word idiot'. They were not made public until 1931, by Josef Hofmiller. [[H.L. Mencken]]'s 1920 translation does not contain these words.)</ref>