The King in Yellow

Content Warning: This section of the guide quotes outdated and offensive language around mental health conditions and suicide. It also more generally discusses stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health and suicide, which were prevalent when The King in Yellow was published.

The story opens with an epigraph in French that translates as: “Do not mock the fools; their madness lasts longer than ours… that is the only difference” (1). This is a line from Dix épines pour une fleur: petites pensées d’un chasseur a l’affut by the 19th-century French writer Adolphe d’Houdetot.

The first-person narrator, Mr. Hildred Castaigne, lives in 1920 New York City, in an imagined future that had survived an invasion by Germany in the 1890s. Castaigne witnesses the opening of the first “Government Lethal Chamber” (2), a small building placed in Washington Square for the purpose of allowing citizens to legally die by suicide if they find existence “intolerable,” as “[i]t is believed that the community will be benefitted by [their] removal” (5).

Four years before, Castaigne suffered a head injury falling from a horse and was declared temporarily “insane” by Dr. Archer, who had him sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.