structural:expansion, stylistic:style_transfer
Alienation, war, and insanity

When I say, "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"... what I mean... If you feel that you're the only one... that you seem crazy you think everything is crazy, you're not alone.

—Waters, quoted in Harris, 2005

O'Neill Surber compared the lyrics of Dark Side of the Moon ' s " Brain Damage " with Karl Marx ' s theory of self-alienation; "there's someone in my head, but it's not me." The lyrics to Wish You Were Here ' s "Welcome to the Machine" suggest what Marx called the alienation of the thing; the song's protagonist preoccupied with material possessions to the point that he becomes estranged from himself and others. Allusions to the alienation of man's species being can be found in Animals; the "Dog" reduced to living instinctively as a non-human. The "Dogs" become alienated from themselves to the extent that they justify their lack of integrity as a "necessary and defensible" position in "a cutthroat world with no room for empathy or moral principle" wrote Detmer. Alienation from others is a consistent theme in the lyrics of Pink Floyd, and it is a core element of The Wall.

War, viewed as the most severe consequence of the manifestation of alienation from others, is also a core element of The Wall, and a recurring theme in the band's music. Waters's father died in combat during the Second World War, and his lyrics often alluded to the cost of war, including those from " Corporal Clegg " (1968), " Free Four " (1972), " Us and Them " (1973), " When the Tigers Broke Free " and " The Fletcher Memorial Home " from The Final Cut (1983), an album dedicated to his late father and subtitled A Requiem for the Postwar Dream. The themes and composition of The Wall express Waters's upbringing in an English society depleted of men after the Second World War, a condition that negatively affected his personal relationships with women.

Waters's lyrics to The Dark Side of the Moon dealt with the pressures of modern life and how those pressures can sometimes cause insanity. He viewed the album's explication of mental illness as illuminating a universal condition. However, Waters also wanted the album to communicate positivity, calling it "an exhortation... to embrace the positive and reject the negative." Reisch described The Wall as "less about the experience of madness than the habits, institutions, and social structures that create or cause madness." The Wall ' s protagonist, Pink, is unable to deal with the circumstances of his life, and overcome by feelings of guilt, slowly closes himself off from the outside world inside a barrier of his own making. After he completes his estrangement from the world, Pink realises that he is "crazy, over the rainbow". He then considers the possibility that his condition may be his own fault: "have I been guilty all this time?" Realising his greatest fear, Pink believes that he has let everyone down, his overbearing mother wisely choosing to smother him, the teachers rightly criticising his poetic aspirations, and his wife justified in leaving him. He then stands trial for "showing feelings of an almost human nature", further exacerbating his alienation of species being. As with the writings of philosopher Michel Foucault, Waters's lyrics suggest Pink's insanity is a product of modern life, the elements of which, "custom, codependancies, and psychopathologies", contribute to his angst, according to Reisch.