Type an excerpt along with 300+ words of your own explaining why/why not Kesey is a terrific writer with a fascinating narrator, Chief Bromden. Mention Kesey's decisions about (1) word choice and placement; (2) jolting images and shifts in narrative technique; (3) the blend of humor and horror. Mention Kesey by name at least five times. Doing so places the proper amount of emphasis on where it belongs, according to many literary theorists (yourself included, perhaps).
Punctuate your excerpt like this, noting quotation marks, parentheses, and period:
"She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes that door when I'm in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more" (152).
99 comments:
“But there are some of us Chronics that the staff made a couple of mistakes on years back, some of us who were Acutes when we came in, and got changed over. Ellis is a Chronic came in an Acute and got fouled up bad when they overloaded him in that filthy brain-murdering room that the black boys call the “Shock Shop.” Now he's nailed against the wall in the same condition they lifted him off the table for the last time, in the same shape, arms out, palms cupped, with the same horror on his face. He's nailed like that on the wall, like a stuffed trophy. They pull the nails when it's time to eat or time to drive him in to bed when they want him to move so's I can mop the puddle where he stands. At the old place he stood so long in one spot the piss ate the floor and beams away under him and he kept falling through to the ward below, giving them all kinds of census headaches down there when roll check came around. (16)”
Kesey does a brilliant job of telling his story using Chief Bromden, a mentally-ill Native American man. First, the use of words the author chose lend verisimilitude to Bromden’s character. His grammar is not perfect, nor very elaborate. He is not so well educated, but he does not sound totally insane. He claims to be a chronic but speaks of someone who a reader would not deem mentally incapable. Second, Kesey catches the reader’s attention entirely when describing the Shock Shop. “A filthy brain-murdering room”, a place that Ellis got fouled up bad is what we learn of the Shock Shop. Kesey directs the reader to be fearful and curious of the Shock Shop only 16 pages into the book. Also, Bromden is very descriptive when speaking of Ellis. He talks of his nailing to the wall, Jesus-like no doubt, and of his urine constantly on the floor. Kesey mentions how the ward pushed Ellis to his catatonic state, giving the reader another intimation at the evils going on in the cuckoo’s nest. There is very little amounts of humor in the passage I chose, surely because of the seriousness of what Chief Bromden is talking about. There is no humor to be found in mental patients residing in the ward for decades, even less comedy found in newly admitted patients turned into vegetables. Kesey has created a quandary in the readers mind because of the narrator he has chosen in Chief Bromden. I believe this to be fully intentional, as the reader must determine whether the ideas shared by the mentally unstable Native are really happening or merely figment of his imagination. The fear in Bromden’s mind is real to him, but is the fear rational based on what is happening in the real world? Is the fog overtaking his judgement, or directing him towards the truth? I am excited to read on!
Kesey is know as one of Oregon’s greatest novelists. He is also known as one of the nation’s finest authors. The way his books are written is to be symbolized. Readers try to comprehend, which may seem sometimes impossible. Ken Kesey gets deep into the meaning of what he is trying to write. His writing could also just be nonsense from all of the drugs that he took also. “The miracle of Cuckoo’s Nest is, first, that a guy could write a novel while regularly blasting his head with hallucinogens, and second, that he could write a very fine novel in which psychedelic awareness, deftly and aptly incorporated, is essential to the tale”-John Daniel, Spit in the Ocean #7. “I’ve enjoyed being a famous writer-except that every once in a while you have to write something.” This could show that he actually does not enjoy writing, but his brilliance comes from the drugs he takes. We talked about in class how Kesey would use should of instead of should’ve possibly on accident, perhaps purposefully because his narrator is someone that could say that. His word choice keeps us on our toes wondering if that is really what he meant to write or not. Kesey’s choice in narrator technique makes the novel as well written as it is. Kesey writes as though he is living through the live of Chief Bromden. Kesey uses humor with the character McMurphy, the patients savior, he brings laughter not horror. Kesey is trying to use McMurphy to give the other patients hope, to be saved from the horror of Nurse Ratched. McMurphy uses his ability to make others laugh and his authority over others to overpower Nurse Ratched. He breaks rules and gambles, to try and get Nurse Ratched on her toes. Kesey uses Nurse Ratched to get the characters into their own personal fogs, and keep them restrained from having fun. McMurphy is being used to reverse Nurse Ratched’s work.
Burch
Pd. 3
“A chair and me float past each other. It’s the first thing I’ve seen. It comes sifting out of the fog off to my right, and for a few seconds it’s right beside my face, just out of my reach. I been accustomed of late to just let things alone when they appear in the fog, sit still and not try to hang on. But this time I’m scared, the way I used to be scared. I try with all I got to pull myself over to the chair and get hold of it, but there’s nothing to brace against and all I can do is thrash the air, all I can do is watch the chair come clear, clearer than ever before to where I can even make out the fingerprint where a worker touched the varnish before it was dry, looming out for a few seconds, then fading on off again. I never seen it where things floated around this way. I never seen it this thick before, thick to where I can’t get down to the floor and get on my feet if I wanted to and walk around. That’s why I’m so scared; I feel I’m going to float off someplace for good this time.”
Kesey is a genius author for this book. I am not sure how I would feel about his writing of other novels, but for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he does a terrific job. Perhaps because Kesey allegedly was a drug addict and was tripping on acid while writing, the bits of the book when Chief Bromden is hallucinating are insanely creative and ridiculously far-fetched. I don’t believe that any sane or sober person could have come up with such twisted, illogical scenes; Kesey does impressive work, transporting the reader into the mind of a schizophrenic Native American man. Interestingly enough, Kesey weaves symbolism throughout even the most insane parts of his book. It is not entirely scribblings of a high madman. Prominent throughout the excerpt that I chose is the appearance of thick fog and no, it is not smoke from Kesey’s crack pipe. Fog has been used in the past by snipers during wartime as a covering for their covert missions. It can be argued that Kesey uses fog as a “safety zone” for Chief Bromden. The fog provides a mental hiding place where he is allowed the ignore the world, remaining unseen and seeing very little. An interesting psychological ploy, Kesey manages to create excellent examples of symbolism and sanity amid the illogical and trippy scenes. While I do not agree with Kesey’s alleged drug use nor am I a huge fan of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he hit a chord with the people of the unsettled ‘50s and ‘60s. The way he tackles the topics of racism and feminism and role reversals throughout his novel is interesting to say the least. Kesey seems to have been a spokesperson of sorts for the hippie movement, doing his best to buck the system. For One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey deserves recognition.
“I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen” (8).
At the beginning of the novel Chief Bromden says this quote. I think Kesey is a terrific writer to make Chief Bromden the narrator of the story. He pretends to be deaf and dumb and with this is able to obtain secret staff information that is kept from the other patients. Bromden is six feet seven inches tall but he has been belittled for so long, he says, “used to be big, but not no more.” The opening lines of the novel gave a glimpse of Bromden’s paranoia and the sense that he is not seeing things from an everyday perspective. For example, he describes Ratched turning into a huge machine and he has to be sedated when the aids try to shave him. It is like we are overhearing his private thoughts and I think that is the best part about him being the narrator. For example this quote is right at the beginning of the novel, They don't bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I'm nearby because they think I'm deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I'm cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years (1). He is a more reliable narrator than any other patient because he pretends to be deaf. Bromden is able to hear the other patients talk about their hate secrets out loud because they think he is deaf. He is the narrator and the author of the story. He is telling the story about his own journey toward sanity. From the quote on page eight we learn that he has a story to tell and it is going to be difficult. In the quote it says to keep an open mind. His hallucinations provide insight into the hidden realities of the hospital and should not be overlooked even though they did not happen.
Kesey was a drug addict and was on drugs when writing this novel. When he describes Chief Bromden’s hallucinations he was probably experiencing some of his own. The hallucinations are crazy which makes me think he had to be experiencing them himself. Kesey is very good at showing what paranoid Native American man thinks and does. He uses examples of symbolism that he creates out of the hallucinations and other scenes. I do not think there would have been any better other than Ken Kesey to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night--throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing of fake time; awful scramble of shaves and breakfasts and appointments and lunches and medications and ten minutes of night so you barely get your eyes closed before the dorm light’s screaming at you to get up and start the scramble again, go like sonofabitch this way, going through the full schedule of a day maybe twenty times an hour, till the Big Nurse sees everybody is right up to the breaking point, and she slacks off on the throttle, eases off the pace on that clock-dial, like some kid been fooling with the moving-picture projection machine and finally get tired watching the film run at ten times its natural speed, got bored with all that silly scampering and insect squeak of talk and turned it back to normal.” Page 76-77
I see Ken Kesey as both a strong writer. The excerpt above shows some of Ken Kesey’s strong work. Kesey made a great choice using Chief Bromden as his narrator. Since Bromden is seen as “deaf and dumb” no one thinks that he is paying much attention to what is going on around him in the ward. In reality Bromden is paying attention to everything and every detail that is happening in the ward. He knows nobody cares if he is around their conversation because they don’t think that he is paying attention to them or can even understand what they are talking about. In the passage Bromden is feeling as though Nurse Ratched can control how fast or slow time goes in the ward, he thinks that she is playing some kind of game with them, trying to in a way to torture them. This would feel like torture when you sit in the same room every day for the whole day for as long as you have to be in the ward. Ken Kesey’s writing in this passage shows how descriptive he is in his writing in this book. Some not so strong writing in the book is when Kesey does not use correct grammar and or word choice. At some points he decides to use should have instead of should’ve, as well as the use of wrong words in random places, but that maybe because it is coming out of Bromden’s mind and Bromden is not the most educated. Or because he is said to have been on drugs while he was writing this book. Some of the times when Kesey jumps from reality to Bromden’s hallucinations it is hard to tell the difference because there is not good transition from reality to hallucination. I would personally like a better transition for my understanding, but for this book and the situation I feel as though it was a good choice not to have a smooth transition between what's real and what's not real. This is because it shows how Bromden can switch from reality to his mind going into an hallucination at any moment. Ken Kesey is also good at blending both humor and horror in this story. Kesey does so by using characters such as McMurphy to lighten up some of the low points in the book. When McMurphy first came to the ward all he could do was laugh and he continues to make others laugh at points in this book. Overall I enjoy Ken Kesey’s writing very much. When I first started reading the book I was not interested and thought it was confusing, but as I continued to read I became more understanding of what is going on in the book and look forward to finishing it and finding out what happens in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I believe Ken Kesey is a terrific narrator to say the least. He does an amazing job at trying to get the reader to think hard about what they're actually reading, and interpret the schizophrenic mind from reality. Kesey made a good choice when he chose Bromden to be the narrative character. While Bromden is the narrator for Kesey's book, us as readers are able to see into the minds of the characters in this ward. We get the opportunity to feel what they may be feeling, and step foot into their shoes. We are not just looking at them as spectators from the outside, or reading about how "insane" all of these characters may be. We can actually read what is going on inside of their heads and know what is making them "insane".
I believe that Kesey uses exceptional word choice!
“...a twisted sinewy dwarf the color of cold asphalt.”
Kesey could have used any other words to create that particular sentence, but instead he uses his intelligence and creates an interesting one for the reader. I think that this sentence more enjoyable to read unlike if it was written as “...A strong dwarf the color of asphalt.”
I think that Kesey does a good job with blending humor and horror within the book. Before McMurphey shows up in the ward, everyone was kind of quiet and minded their own business. The ward came off of very dark and gloomy. Everything is the same everyday, and no one ever messes with the schedule, because they were scared of Mrs. Ratched. After McMurphey shows up in the ward, he lightens up the mood a little. He likes to mess with Ratched and try to get under her skin. He gets everyone to interact with each other more than usual. McMurphey even becomes closer with the doctor and talks him into planning a carnival for the ward. McMurphey is just trying to make the best of his time at the ward with the other patients. I am excited to read more of the book and see how it ends!
Although I have much fascination with Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest I have much more fascination for Ken Kesey himself. Not only does he do an astounding job at word placement and shifts in narrative technique but also at jolting images intelligently blending humor and horror. This man had a deep mind with good intentions of the contents. Thus Kesey presented us this gift of a mind boggling experience.
Within Kesey’s word placement, I catch this feeling that Kesey is not putting “Big Nurse” within these pages for the sake of a nickname. I think what the author is trying to do here is make the reader plastered with Nurse Ratched in their brains. Kesey does not want the reader to forget this Nurse and how terrible she is--according to the narrator.
When Kesey’s narrative shift is most noticeable is when he switches from Chief Bromden telling stories about other happenings in the wing to telling what is happening to Bromden personally. Sometimes this catches me off guard and I begin to wonder who is telling these stories because I sometimes feel like the narrator gets changed to McMurphy based on the story being told. However, I do find Bromden to have this Forest Gump type character to him. They both happen to appear where all the action is happening and are casted to the side until someone needs them,whether it be as a football player or a hall sweeper.
Oh where to begin with the jolting images… There are numerous amounts of jolting images within One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that there is not a chance of me listing them all. Why Ken Kesey adds these into the story really intrigues me. Is it as a reminder that the narrator is not reliable or is it simply a technique to make the reader into a page turner? For example, when Bromden speaks of a Santa figure I could not help but read that paragraph over and over. I wasn’t even sure I read the words correctly, but it kept me going. There was another instance where Chief did not take his bedtime pills and the floors started to ascend down to a dungeon type setting of no escape. First, my mind was freaking out because I thought this was actually happening in the institution when in reality this was not reality at all.
Blending humor and horror: When McMurphy arrives he is cheerful, joking, and laughing hysterically. However, all this fun is making the rest of the residents uneasy and frightened. Sort of scary that these patients react this way to a trait which makes up a person. They are so used to isolation and discipline that they don’t even recognize a good old joke when they see one. Sad really.
“‘Damn, what a sorry-looking outfit. You boys don’t look so crazy to me.” He’s trying to get them to loosen up, the way you see an auctioneer spinning jokes to loosen up the crowd before the bidding starts. “‘Which one of you claims to be the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It’s my first day, and what I like to do is make a good impression straight off on the right man if he can prove to me he is the right man. Who’s the bull goose looney here? (19)’”
Though there are several very skillfully-crafted areas in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there is one area of this novel where it becomes evident that the author, Ken Kesey, has amazing ability to write from beginning novel, located on page 13. In this passage, Kesey (through a narration recited by Chief Bromden) describes McMurphy in clear and vivid detail. The excerpt is as follows:
He’s got on work-farm pants and shirt,sunned out till arms are the color of oxblood leather from working long in the fields. He’s got a primer-black motorcycle cap stuck in his hair and a leather jacket over one arm, and he’s got on boots gray and dusty and heavy enough to kick a man half in two. He walks away from Cheswick and takes off the cap and goes to beating a dust storm out of his thigh. One of the black boys circles him with the thermometer and starts going around shaking hands before the black boy can take good aim. The way he talks, his wink, his loud talk, his swagger all remind me of a car salesman or a stock auctioneer--or one of those pitchmen you see on a sideshow stage, out in front of his flapping banners, standing there in a striped shirt with yellow buttons, drawing the faces off the sawdust like a magnet.
Instead of just giving a concise and simple description of McMurphy, Kesey writes out this description giving the reader a very clear and vivid image of how physically McMurphy appears. Not only does Kesey give the reader a good description of McMurphy in a physical sense, but he also gives the reader enough of a description to actually feel the aura and interpret that this character has. One of the lines from the excerpt says “The way he talks, his wink, his loud talk, his swagger…”, this line in particular gave me a really good sense of what McMurphy’s disposition. Kesey’s description of the characters also gives the reader a clear understanding of that character’s attitude and disposition to them being admitted to the ward. The author writes in such a strategic manner as well. Kesey describes McMurphy in a way that makes McMurphy seem as if he is a heroic/ god-like figure. By making Chief Bromden the narrator of the story, Kesey opened the door for so many opportunities to get a good description of what every character is like. Chief Bromden is extremely observant and picks up on almost everything. He is far more intelligent than any of the other characters could have ever imagined, and is not given enough credit for what he does. However, all of the other characters in the story just assume that he is a “deaf and dumb Indian”.
Breitzman 3
Ken Kesey is a phenomenal writer who does a fantastic job of blending strong and humorous word choice with various narrative techniques to help present the reader with a strong mental image. One excerpt from his very famous novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, helps display his brilliance as a writer.
"Buddy, don't give me that tender little mother crap. She may be a mother, but she's big as a damn barn and tough as knife metal. She fooled me with that kindly little old mother bit for maybe three minutes when I came in this morning, but no longer. I don't think she's really fooled any of you guys for any six months or a year, neither. Hooowee, I've seen some bitches in my time, but she takes the cake. (60)"
Ken Kesey's word choice in this paragraph is simple which helps display his brilliance. The mood of this paragraph is to be persuasive and serious and Kesey's simple word choice helps provide a more clearer image of what the character, R.P. McMurphy, is trying to point out to the other patients about Nurse Ratched. His word choice of "tender" and "kindly" when describing Nurse Ratched and her so-called motherly tendencies towards the patients perfectly fits the situation. McMurphy is trying to tell Harding and the patients that Nurse Ratched is fooling them, for she is not motherly at all. A mother is supposed to be kind and tender towards her children. The patients in the ward consider Nurse Ratched to be their mother, yet as Kesey displays in the paragraph, what a mother should be is what Nurse Ratched is certainly not towards her patients.
Kesey displays great use of narrative techniques in this paragraph. He uses a simile when describing Nurse Ratched, calling her "as big as a damn barn and tough as knife metal." These similes relate to the masculine appearance of Nurse Ratched described earlier in the novel. This statement could also be seen as a hyperbole for, due to his anger towards the situation, McMurphy may be exaggerating Nurse Ratched's size. Using two literary devices in one sentence is a great literary technique used by Kesey in this particular paragraph.
Another trait that great writers possess is the ability to blend humor with horror in their writing. In this paragraph, there are several humorous implications Kesey displays. This sentence involving similes above was a way that Kesey used humor in his writing, for comparing Nurse Ratched and her size to a barn has assumingly humorous implications for several readers. His use of swear words in the excerpt also has humorous qualities, particularly when McMurphy calls Nurse Ratched a bitch. Calling Nurse Ratched as big as a damn barn also could be disconcerting to some people which is a subtle way Kesey displays horror within his writing.
Ken Kesey is a brilliant writer who shows his brilliance all throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He is very smart when writing and uses great variety. The book has been very interesting so far, and I look forward to reading the rest of the book which will display more of Ken Kesey's brilliance.
House 2
“She paused again, took a look at him herself. He shrugged his shoulders and with a loud sigh slapped both hands down on his knees and pushed himself standing out of the chair. He stretched and yawned and scratched the nose again and started strolling across the day-room floor to where she sat by the Nurses’ Station, heisting his pants with his thumbs as he walked. I could see it was too late to keep him from doing whatever fool thing he had in mind, and I just watched, like everybody else. He walked with long steps, too long, and he had his thumbs hooked in his pockets again, The iron in his boot heels cracked lightning out of the tile. He was the logger again, the swaggering gambler, the big redheaded brawling Irish man, the cowboy out of the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare.” (201)
Ken Kesey is a brilliant author who knows how to captivate the reader’s attention encouraging them to continue reading in order to discover how the novel ends and what happens to the characters. Kesey’s use of Chief Bromden as an unreliable narrator adds suspense to the story. The reader is oftentimes taken aback wondering how much of the novel being told through Bromden’s eyes can be trusted and viewed as believable. Chief Bromden as the narrator adds a whole new level to the novel; one I have never been exposed to before. Kesey uses superb word choice throughout the entire novel. Sometimes Kesey does not used the largest or most descriptive words possible, but he will use words that best suit the character and the way he has chosen to portray them. This can be seen multiple times throughout the novel when Kesey will have Chief Bromden say ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’, this lends verisimilitude to the setting of the novel because many Indians can probably be viewed as speaking that way (I am not trying to be stereotypical). However in the above excerpt, Kesey uses great diction to describe McMurphy advancing towards Nurse Ratched; words such as “heisting” and “the big redheaded brawling Irish man”. Kesey also does a great job of using imagery to show, not just tell, the reader what is unfolding before them. He phrases things in ways that the reader can picture what is going on, such as “The iron in his boot heels cracked lightning out of the tile.” In the above excerpt, the reader can picture very vividly McMurphy approaching the Big Nurse with his hands his belt loops holding his pants up and walking with swag. There are many other times throughout the novel when Kesey uses good adjectives to help the reader. Throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, there are many examples of the combination of horror and humor. This is shown in the above excerpt when Kesey describes McMurphy as “the swaggering gambler, the big redheaded brawling Irish man, the cowboy out of the TV set walking down the middle of the street to meet a dare”. Humor can be seen when McMurphy is the swaggering gambler (I did not know that swag was a word then. Maybe Kesey invented it?), and horror can be observed when McMurphy is the big mean cowboy. Humor versus horror can also be viewed throughout the novel with the electric shock table or the names of the characters, such as Ruckly.
Darrington 7
“You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap! Five cents’ worth of electricity through the brain and you are jointly administered therapy and a punishment for your hostile go-to-hell behavior, on top of being put out of everyone’s way for six hours to three days, depending on the individual. Even when you do regain consciousness you are in a state of disorientation for days. You are unable to think coherently. You can’t recall things. Enough of these treatments and a man could turn out like Mr. Ellis you see over there against the wall. A drooling, pants-wetting idiot at thirty-five. Or turn into a mindless organism that eats and eliminates and yells ‘fuck the wife,’ like Ruckly. Or look at Chief broom clutching to his namesake there beside you” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, page 69).
After reading a portion of Ken Kesey’s most renowned novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest, I can say that I am thoroughly impressed. Kesey has an incredible way of describing events and adding vivid details to a story. He is able to make even the most monotonous events interesting to read about. Kesey makes very wise statements about social dynamics and our society as a whole, while subtly blending these observations into a story involving the mentally handicapped. In the novel, Kesey has written around one hundred pages over merely two days at the mental hospital. How he is able to do this, while keeping the reader engaged is incredible. I find his comparisons, references, and overall flow to be sufficiently entertaining.
Chief Bromden is an interesting narrator because he is thought to be deaf by his companions. For this reason, he hears statements that would typically go unheard. Chief Bromden describes himself as a chronic,or someone who can barely think, but his recollection and explanations appear to contradict himself. Kesey uses effective word placement throughout the novel as well. He makes each character an individual and diversifies each person’s style, from Billy Bibbit’s stuttering to McMurphy cutting his words short and speaking like an Irish rebel. Kesey is able to draw suspense by organizing side stories and writing as though as semi-literate Native American is speaking, all the way down to the improper grammar “should of.” Kesey alternates between Chief Bromden narrating and the whole group’s conversation telling the story. This allows for different perspectives and more variety. Kesey is very descriptive as well, describing even the most gruesome events with ease. As seen in the excerpt above, Kesey is able to discuss the terribly inhumane act of electroshock therapy easily at the same time he is making the reader chuckle. Although we should not laugh at the sad fact that Ruckly and Mr. Ellis are mentally fried, Kesey allows us to snicker, but also feel for them and their predicament.
“The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but theres no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see - just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass. Workers standing there to his knees in what looks like clinkers. A furnace got its
mouth open somewhere, licks up somebody.” (pg. 88)
Kesey is an incredible writer with an incredible imagination and I have only read just a mere half of the book. Kesey uses such great techniques of writing styles and his imagery just comes to life when he is describing something to his readers. I thought that making Chief Bromden the narrator of the story was a well thought out process. I feel as if we see more from his perspective than anyone elses, and he tells the story in a way that no other character could. Kesey really challenges his readers throughout the book. Some of the word placement and word choices he uses really get us to think about what he is saying. There are some parts that I had to read over again just to make sure I fully understood everything he was saying. In some ways we can relate the book to ourselves and our personal lives. Maybe, we too feel like we're trapped in some way. The paragraph I had used above was one of my favorite parts of the book. The way that Kesey takes a furnace and relates it to a some kind of terrifying monster that eats people is genius and the way that he is so descriptive about what Bromden is thinking he might see paints such a colorful picture in our minds.
Kesey has created a book that can make you feel frightened, but one that you can also chuckle at at the same time. When McMurphy becomes a patient, he is the life of the party by being so bold and so bright. He is most definitely the humor, but the frightening fact is that all of the men are just so scared to laugh at his jokes or the way he acts. Why are they so frightened? Is it because they feel it is wrong to laugh at someone acting so childish, or is it because they are afraid of what might happen if they do?
I am very enthusiastic about finishing this book and reading more of Kesey's incredible work!
Chmela 2
“Up ahead of me in the lunch line I see a tray sling in the air, a green plastic cloud raining milk and peas and vegetable soup. Sefelt’s jittering out of the line on one foot with his arms both up in the air, falls backward in a stiff arch, and the whites of his eyes come by me upside down. His head hits the tile with a crack like rocks under water, and he holds the arch, like a twitching, jerking bridge. Fredrickson and Scanlon make a jump to help, but the big black boy shoves them back and grabs a flat stick out of his back pocket, got tape wrapped around it and covered with a brown stain. He pries Sefelt’s mouth open and shoves the stick between his teeth, and I hear the stick splinter with Sefelt’s bite.” (Page 176)
I love reading Ken Kesey’s book because of the lack of connection there is with the reader and how experimental his word choice is. He does not ever give direct information, but leads us into a parallel universe and makes us grasp it ourselves. This is what makes the book interesting; the line between wanting to let them out of the ward and wanting to hit them for being ridiculously unintelligent. Kesey’s word choice is amazing, especially in this bit, using words like arch, making me think of something elegant. Also using the word splinter as a sound rather than a thing. This brings pain to me rather than just sorrow. Kesey uses great word choice explaining that the sound of him hitting his head is like “rocks under water,” explaining the feeling too. He uses the lunch line as a naive way to help us understand the intelligence of the characters in the book and how they are in a jail, or school. Making us feel sorrow for these men who posses greatness within themselves, but cannot find such prosperity. Kesey goes from talking about the hard nature of seizures that Sefelt has to the devilish black boy poking him with a stick, helping him rather than hurting him. This intense shift is so indirect, but shows how the black boys are not so evil and can scurry from the Big Nurse’s ways. The account of the tray and food flying through the air is very humorous because it makes me think of a childish food fight, or a cartoon with food landing on someone. Although, we do not know where the food lands we can only assume it is on someone, or their belongings. Kesey is an amazing writer, although hard to keep track of where he is going, I will never become uninterested while reading this book. Kesey is an extraterrestrial style writer that keeps the reader guessing. Who will come back again and again looking different and taking on different effects and styles of writing.
“I’m mopping near the ward door when a key hits it from the other side and I know it’s the Big Nurse by the way the lockworks cleave to the key, soft and swift and familiar she been around locks so long. She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel-- tip of each finger the same color as her lips. Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can’t tell which.
Throughout the book Kesey has demonstrated his literary skills. His writings produce many images in my head that make One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so enjoyable to read. In this excerpt from the novel Kesey uses such fine imagery and word choice to help describe the nurse and motions she is going through. When he first starts talking about her and how she is entering the ward it helps relate to the later on message that Nurse Ratched is a robot in his mind. The way the locks open up so perfect for her because she is so “familiar” with them. He also describes her nails the color orange saying they are cold and hot. It made me wonder how the color orange can be both and made me imagine the exact color and how she would be as a character in this book.So hot she burns you or so cold she freezes you. Kesey also describes her as “Big Nurse” in this passage. It makes me wonder why the word Big is capitalized. Is it to emphasize how much of a role she has in the book or is it to make her seem like a dominating force who looms over the other people in the ward. Another thing Kesey does well is how he sets up his sentences and the narrative techniques he uses here. Chief Bromden is talking about her as if he is frightened by what she can do and who she is. His sentences start off long and descriptive while she is trying to get in and then once he sees her they become short. “Funny orange. Like the tip of a soldering iron.” Where before when he is talking about her it’s long and drawn out. It is as if Kesey is trying to make the allusion that we are anticipating her and waiting for her to come. Making the longer sentences seem rushed. I really enjoy the way Kesey sets up and describes each and every detail in his stories.
"She'll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don't lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five,but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good." pg 113
Ken Kesey has an incredible way of giving imagery and description throughout the novel. Chief Bromden refers to Nurse Ratched as being a Combine and having all the authority in the ward. The patients in the ward are too scared to challenge Nurse Ratched and the daily routine stays the same everyday.
"He's trying to get them to loosen up, the way you see an auctioneer spinning jokes to loosen up the crowd before the bidding starts. "Which one of you claims to be the craziest? Which one is the biggest loony? Who runs these card games? It's my first day, and what I would like to do is make a good impression straight off on the right man if he can prove to me he is the man. Who's the bull goose loony here? pg 19
We are introduced to R.P McMurphy early in this novel. McMurphy is portrayed to be tough, bold and one that wants attention. McMurphey is not frightened by Nurse Ratched and is willing to challenge her. This is significant because the Big Nurse is never challenged.
Although I have only read half of this book, I am extremely interested in Kesey's novel. The description and characters in the book make it enjoyable to read!
2 Williams
“Twists a knob, and the whole floor goes to slipping down away from him standing in the door, lowering into the building like a platform in a grain elevator… I go to clawing at that damned sheet tied across me and just about have it loose when a whole wall slides up, reveals a huge room of endless machines stretching clear out of sight, swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and down catwalks, faces blank and reamy in firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces.”
I think Ken Kesey is a terrific writer for many reasons; the main reason being as he almost never directly describes something to the reader. The reader must interpret Kesey’s writing and distinguish for themselves what is real and what is not -- this is needed because the narrator, Chief Bromden, is unreliable due to his psychofrenia. However, Kesey leaves the reader many clues like drastically exaggerating the events that are made up by Chief Bromden like the quote above about the dream Chief was having. In addition to that topic, I enjoy how Kesey/Chief jumps immediately from what the reader can assume is reality and what can be assumed as the makings of Chief’s mind. This shift in narrative technique takes the reader off guard but makes them get the true insight of Kesey’s/Chief’s thoughts.
Word placement is everything when it comes to Ken Kesey’s writing. His superb usage of word placement can be found in the quote above with the phrase “...swarming, with sweating, shirtless men…” and “...faces blank and reamy in the firelight thrown from a hundred blast furnaces”. These are great examples of Kesey’s wonderful word placement because it really takes the reader right to Chief’s dream and this also provides the reader with profound images of what Chief actually believes he is seeing. Kesey also mixes humor with horror throughout the book like when the black boys are looking for the Vaseline “for the thermometer” and Nurse Ratched says, “‘But mind you boys don’t group up in there.’” This is humorous to the teenage mind but also horrifying as it is alluded that the black boys rape the new Admissions. Another example of the mix of humor and horror is the many times meetings in which Nurse Ratched and the men discuss Harding’s inability to satisfy his “sexy” wife. This seems like a humorous topic but in reality Harding can’t satisfy her because he is not normal for the Outside and is trapped in the stereotype of what society is making him be rather than how he wants to be.
I believe that Ken Kesey is a phenomenal author. When we read a narrated book, we typically expect a “normal,” “sane” narrator. I love how Kesey uses Bromden’s insanity. I, personally, often forget that Bromden is not entirely sane. I get caught up in the book, and don’t always remember that everything Bromden is saying, could merely be in his head. In a way, I believe this is how it might feel to have schizophrenia; always wondering if this or that is real or in your head. If you have ever watched a Beautiful Mind, I imagine this is how the protagonist feels. Then we get a chapter where we are reminded that Bromden’s head can create anything, like, for instance, the dream chapter.
Kesey’s word choice, I do not fully understand though. He often uses “could of” instead of “could have.” Possibly its because Bromden is narrating, and Native American are supposed to be illiterate. Maybe Kesey is just trying to show us that Bromden might not know the difference between “could of” and “could have” but he truly sees more than most of us. That could also be due to the fact that he is silent and chooses to listen instead of spew nonsense prattle.
I like Kesey’s blend of humor and horror. These are my 2 favorite things, and its truly rare to find someone who can successfully blend them and have them compliment each other. Kesey can have me laughing about throwing butter on a clock, then have me awed by his use of horror when one of the patients is murdered in his dream, and truly ended up dead.
Greg Lundberg Period 2
PART ONE
“It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, have to crawl around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs till I find my gobs of gum stuck there. Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.” - Page 128
Ken Kesey tries something new with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He writes the tale from the perspective of Chief Bromden, a towering Native American who resides in a mental institution. Some critics think that the narrator of the story should be R.P. McMurphy, the “new guy on the block” who is looking to gamble and have fun (the direct opposite of every other resident). I believe, however, that Chief Bromden’s viewpoint allows the reader to better understand how the other patients live and think under Nurse Ratched’s rule, thus enabling Kesey to convey how terrified people like Bromden are of the ward staff. Kesey’s choice as Bromden for the narrator was an interesting choice that gives his audience incredible insight, such as his feelings toward McMurphy’s shenanigans and why he prefers to stay silent.
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“The picture is a guy fly-fishing somewhere in the mountains, looks like the Ochocos near Paineville--snow on the peaks showing over the pines, long white aspen trunks lining the stream, sheep sorrel growing in sour green patches. The guy is flicking his fly in a pool behind a rock. It’s no place for a fly, it’s a place for a single egg on a number-six hook--he’d do better to drift the fly over those riffles downstream.” - Page 126
One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest displays other skills of Ken Kesey, too. The phrasing of his words is impeccable. Descriptive words such as “flicking” or “riffles” jumped out to me as I was reading this passage. Kesey makes a serious effort to describe a basic painting that has nothing to do with the plot. I think it was an interesting decision, showing us that even though these guys are “insane”, they are still humans; they can appreciate simple things like art.
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“There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at the visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed. It’s a real nice place to stretch your legs and take it easy.” - Page 126
Kesey implement a different narrative technique. Instead of just simply describing the painting in this passage, Chief Bromden actually travels into the painting to watch the Public Relations Man talk. Here, Kesey explores what happens when a picture becomes reality (for Bromden, anyways). When I was reading this, it took me by surprise, and I had to reread this section to make sure I understood it correctly.
Greg Lundberg Period 2
PART TWO
“A guy sitting in the room some place I can’t see in talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts of and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.” - Page 129
Kesey is brilliant in his blend of comedy and horror. Obviously, a man chopping off his testicles is frightening. However, Kesey intertwines some humor within. The staff did not notice a guy was bleeding out on a toilet until he fell off. As morbid as that is, I did chuckle while I was reading this. Additionally, when Kesey says “all the guy had to do was wait”, he meant Rawler was going to be “castrated” anyways. If Rawler wasn’t going to do it himself, someone like Nurse Ratched would have done it.
Ken Kesey is an amazing author due to many different techniques he uses while writing. Being an author is like being an artist; Kesey has crafted the character’s names in this book to go along with their personalities. Billy Bibbit has an impossible name to say for someone who has a speech impediment. Ellis has gone through many shock treatments on a table that looks like the crucifix and his name rhymes/sounds like Jesus. He also may have intended on Ellis’s name to sound like LSD coincidence or not it would go right along with his character. He also chose a very unique narrator which helps make the story more interesting. Chief Bromden is not only an interesting narrator, but character as well. He is a very tall Indian man who would seem very strong willed but he is more or less just a doormat on the ward. He also suffers from schizophrenia and hallucinations which makes it tough for the reader to decide what is true or what is just a hallucination adding more drama and suspense to the book. He pretends to be deaf to survive from the horrible care of nurse Ratched. This also puts him and the readers at an advantage because nobody is afraid to talk in front of him so we get to learn lots of secrets from the other characters. We can tell he is going to be an interesting character as soon as page 8 when he says, “I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! (Cuckoo’s, 8).” We are waiting to see if he does blow his secret and speak his mind in the end.
Kesey also puts a number of jolting images in this book and he writes so picturesque that the reader has no problem visualizing what’s going on whether that is a good thing or not is up to you: “Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead. (pg, 129)”
McMurphy rides into the ward like he will be the next King, and maybe he shall, but Kesey alters McMurphys attitude back and forth causing the audience to wonder; it is the perfect amount of a character shift. McMurphy is poorly behaved when he first arrives and about a week and a half through his stay he is now a team player. He tries hard to have all of the men stand up for themselves and stand with him. He encourages them in the scene where he bets that he could lift something very heavy and loses, the men start to make fun of him for being confident and thats when McMurphy teaches them all a lesson, at least he tried. That hit home on a lot of the other characters and readers.
The topics that Kesey writes about are extremes and most of the scenes can make the readers turn in their seats. Kesey strategically places humor scenes to lighten the mood to keep the readers interested so they don’t give up on the book. He is very successful with this as well. An example would be the butter scene where they are throwing butter at the clock, this is very light hearted and reminds the readers when they were younger and would find joy and humor in that too instead of the dark things going on in the ward.
Kesey uses Chief Bromden as his narrator, a half indian man who pretends to be def. In the reading I have noticed Ken Kesey using such complicated and structured writing when Bromden speaks or thinks, but every once in a while he adds a little slip from sanity into the writing. Some characters will not make any sense and then for one moment in the reading they say a very intelligent statement. “‘Buddy,’ he says to Ellis in a solemn voice, ‘my name is R.P. McMurphy and I don’t like to see a full-grown man sloshin’ around in his own water. Whyn’t you go get dried up?’ Ellis looks down at the puddle around his feet in pure surprise. ‘Why, I thank you,’ he says and even moves off a few steps toward the latrine before the nails pull his hands back to the wall.”(One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, pages 22-23) This is one of my favorite examples because Ellis doesn’t ever know what is happening because he is always pinned to that wall. When McMurphy mentions Ellis has soiled himself he moves toward reality and tries to move to fix himself. The section in the novel about Santa Clause creates the most vivid image so far in the book for me. “One Christmas at midnight on the button, at the old place, the ward door blows open with a crash, in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry. The black boys get him cornered in the hall with flashlights. I see he’s all tangled in the tinsel Public Relation has been stringing all over the place, and he’s stumbling around in it in the dark…The black boys move in with the flashlights. They kept him with us six years before they discharged him, cleanshaven and skinny as a pole.” (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, page 76) This excerpt Kesey adds creates a little bit of humor because it is random at the beginning of the chapter. Knowing that Santa Clause is supposed to be a fat, jolly guy and then he is released as a skinny pole is horrific to a child’s hood. I am sure Ken Kesey has more twisted parts in this lovely, creepy novel. His imagination is excellent and the more I read Ken Kesey’s book the more I think Chief Bromden could possibly be hallucinating all of this but I guess I will see if I am wrong when the book is finished.
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Ken Kesey’s One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest thus far. Unlike most classic novels that are written, I feel as though I can relate to this book unlike any other because it is not written in old English and the author uses plenty of humor to make the book an enjoyable experience while also showing the reader what themes the author is trying to get across. Chief Bromden is a perfect narrator because he describes the scenes that he sees so well and at this point in the book he is beginning to participate in events and has sort of evolved into the protagonist that we all hoped he would be.
There are many examples of word choice that make the reader think. When Chief Bromden is describing his experiences in the Shock Shop, “The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrist and ankles running under leather straps, sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead.” Instead of simply saying that the table in the Shock Shop was terrifying, Kesey described it in such a way that not only strikes horror into the reader’s mind but also seems to reference the bible by sounding similar to being crucified. Also, on page 126, Chief Bromden describes a visiting doctor as being “...covered with gray cobwebs on his yellow skull….” The Kesey used a brilliant metaphor to spider webs to describe the man’s hair. It also helps us picture the kind of man that he is.
Jolting images are a common occurrence throughout the book, such as when McMurphy is trying to lift the massive panel. “His arms swell, and the veins squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. He leans back, and the tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands.” After the reader reads this part, it forms a vivid image in their head and is so descriptive that it is almost shocking. In the following chapters, the story suddenly switches to flashbacks, where Chief Bromden is describing his own life. Why Kesey chose that moment to describe the flashbacks is a mystery, however they give the reader a sense of relief to know more about Chief’s past and start to include his in the story that he is narrating.
On page 129, there is a very interesting chapter that seems very out of place. Old Rawler has castrated himself and bleed to death. The way that it is described is almost funny because Kesey uses words like “the can,” to describe that Rawler was sitting on the toilet when it happened, and “nuts,” to describe his male body parts. This mixture of humorous words and a horrifying scenario shocks the reader and makes them think very hard about what happened and why. The chapter was obviously used as a symbol for something but it is difficult to determine what at this point in the book.
“They laugh and then I hear them mumbling behind me, heads close together. Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets. They don’t bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years.” (1)
Kesey is a brilliant man when it comes to choosing how to write this magnificent novel. He chose a narrator that observes all and hears all due to Chief Bromden’s “caginess”. Since Kesey has a mentally ill patient as his narrator, he carefully provides inadequate grammar and word usage. Not to the point that the story becomes a jumbled mess, but enough to make the reader pick up on. From the start, Kesey gives you mental pictures. For instance, Kesey depicts these awful black machines humming in the background while these black men, slave-like, preach all these hateful comments with Bromden sulking around brooming his area. Bromden picks up what they say though. Kesey does not say what the machinery is right away though. All of this is coming from a mentally ill patient so we don’t truly know how much is true and how much is false. We later learn that Bromden has been at the mental institution for a while now and is what the would call a Chronic, but he isn’t the vegetable that he describes a little later on. As the narrator, Kesey allows Bromden to know what is going on and allows the reader to think they know what is going on just to throw a curveball at the reader and confuse him with one of Bromden’s imaginative thoughts. The humor is a different kind than what one may be used to. Kesey uses his humor in references and other types. The caginess of Bromden is almost comical since nobody has picked up his fake deafness for 20 years, but McMurphy does right away. He also uses humor as they constantly make bets on little things such as butter reaching the ground before a certain time. He also shows horror when Bromden pictures all of these terrifying machines doing awful things to the people of the institution. Kesey depicts these horrific scenes that aren’t existent to the other patients, but “it’s the truth even if it did not happen! (8)” He uses great word choice to make these machines feel and seem real even though they are not. Bromden tells the reader what happens to these people and about the mysterious fog that rolls over them like it’s happening. We learn that Kesey made Bromden think all of this due to his mental illness.
In my opinion, Ken Kesey’s novel is fairly good. I would not go as far as to say that he is a terrific writer, however I do believe that he is indeed terrific at indicating symbolism as well as insinuation with very sly foreshadowing and dark humor.
Kesey’s decision to have the narrator as an insane, ‘deaf and dumb’ native ‘Chief’ was genius. I think that Chief Bromden’s character does an excellent job at portraying what the book is meant to be about. Bromden is very unreliable as a main source in the beginning of the novel, saying things like,
“I can’t see six inches in front of me through the fog and the only thing I can hear over the wail I’m making is the Big Nurse whoop and charge up the hall while she crashes patients outta her way with that wicker bag” (7).
Bromden’s character goes through the transformation of sanity. He begins the novel, as you can see, being fairly schizophrenic, envisioning fog that surrounds him when he becomes anxious or scared. At the end of the novel, Bromden sort of comes to his senses about the world around him and of his own personal power; becoming sane.
Through becoming sane however, he does commit a form of homicide. Kesey uses Bromden to show the transition, however he also uses him for immensely dark satirical means. He uses the Chief’s ‘deaf and dumb’ characteristic to sort of relay the secrets of the ward. The most disturbing, I think, to be the three main black boys and their acts. The boys, with approval from Nurse Ratched, rape all of the new admissions to the ward. Though Kesey does not out-right say that they commit such things, it is insinuated very harshly through the use of “sex-acts” (1) and the mention of a large amount of Vaseline. I do not like the fact that rape was included in this, as it makes me very uncomfortable, however for the illustration of the harshness of the asylum, it works well.
“A furnace got its mouth open somewhere, licks up somebody. I think about jumping up and running around and waking up McMurphy and Harding and as many of the guys as I can, but there wouldn’t be any sense in it. If I shook somebody awake he’d say, Why you crazy idiot, what the hell’s eating you? And then probably help one of the workers lift me onto one of those hooks himself saying, How about let’s see what the insides of an Indian are like? I hear the high, cold, whistling wet breath of the fog machine, see the first wisps of it come seeping out from under McMurphy’s bed. I hope he knows enough to hide in the fog” (88).
I believe that Ken Kesey is a brilliant writer for multiple reasons. While writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey experimented with having an unreliable narrator for the story. Any less of a writer would not have been able to compose a story that grips the reader the way Kesey does. Using various techniques, the reader can see into the mind of the narrator, Chief Bromden. While Chief Bromden is narrating, the sentence structure changes from what it would be like if one of the Acutes would be narrating or talking. Kesey specifically modifies sentences to flow less smoothly and have various errors when Bromden’s thoughts are given to the reader. I think Kesey is a pioneer in writing for being brave enough for attempting this style. Kesey open the door to a style of writing many people had not even considered.
Some of my favorite chapters are the ones where Kesey uses short narrations from Chief Bromden. These may be giving foreshadow to what will happen later in the story, however I like them because it lets the reader see more into the mind of Bromden. One of my favorite comes on page 128 where Bromden is narrating. The chapter is only five sentences long and is able to grip the reader and give riveting detail. Bromden talks about how McMurphy “keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at” (128). I enjoy how Kesey arranged the novel so the reader gets Chief Bromden’s perspective on McMurphy and his ideas separate from when the reader gets the perspectives from others.
I enjoy the blend of humor and horror that Kesey gives in the story. It adds excitement to the plot and makes the story more interesting. The job of the author is the entertain the reader with their story; adding humor and horror elements accomplishes this in a very unique and creative way.
“A workman’s eyes snap shut while he’s going at a full run, and he drops in his tracks; two of his buddies running by grab him us and lateral him into a furnace as they pass. The furnace whoops a ball of fire and I hear the popping of a million tubes like walking through a field of seed pods. This sound mixes with the whirr and clang of the rest of the machines. There’s a rhythm to it, like a thundering pulse” (87).
In the excerpt I chose, Kesey proves to us that his language and writing abilities are profound. The way he orchestrated these words together made it stand out to me. Kesey added words in this paragraph that gave a machine feel to the writing, while keeping those words subtly mixed in. Words like snap, tracks, popping, and clang resemble machinery, but not until the last sentence of the paragraph does it come out and say machine. Throughout the book, Kesey hints to us what we should be feeling or picturing, and ties everything together with his carefully placed word choice. This not only pushes our mind in the direction he intends, but it also adds colorful language, and interesting vocabulary to his text.
Using action verbs such as snap, whoop, and drop give an intensity to the sentence that would not normally be there. If the first sentence was written as, “A workman’s eyes shut while he was running, and he stopped in his tracks”, you lose the original chaotic imagery. Kesey intends for some sections of the book to hit you harder than others, so he adds those different verbs in there to create emphasis. These verbs put images in the readers head; the last sentence also created imagery. The phrase, “thundering pulse”, immediately put a picture of a man with his heart racing, preceded by a crack of thunder. This image may not be the same to everyone, but thats the cool part of Kesey’s imagery. He lets the reader choose how they want to see it rather than telling them exactly how things look. He uses many metaphors/similes to help guide that picture, but doesn’t tell you to think something. I feel like as a person, Kesey intended for it to be like this to promote creativity, and let people think for themselves. I believe that how I picture this scene is very different from the people sitting near me, reading the same excerpt.
Some of the metaphors that Kesey uses in his novel seemed to be created to show the opposites of light and dark. This tactic is often used in paintings, but Kesey did a wonderful job creating it through metaphors. In the paragraph that I chose, Kesey compared a ball of fire popping to walking through a field of seed pods. The fire is dark and war like, whereas the field reminds me of home and has a light feeling to it. He does this often in the book to contrast two very different emotions.
Kuehn 2
“I was seeing him different than when he first came in; I was seeing more to him than just big hands and red sideburns and a broken-nosed grin. I’d see him do things that didn’t fit with his face or hands, things like painting a picture at OT with real paints on a blank paper with no lines or numbers anywhere on it to tell him where to paint, or like writing letters to somebody in a beautiful flowing hand. How could a man who looked like him paint pictures or write letters to people or be upset and worried like I saw him once when he got a letter back? These were the kind of things you expected from Billy Bibbit or Harding. Harding had hands that looked like they should have done paintings though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks fro dog-houses. McMurphy wasn’t like that. He hadn’t let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, anymore than he’d let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.” (Page 162)
I believe that Ken Kesey is a terrific writer and he has a fascinating narrator in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey put thought into choosing which words to use where he did. Chief Bromden points out that McMurphy uses “real paints and a blank paper” to create his paintings. He then expands on the paper’s lack of lines or numbers. Clearly, Kesey believed these details were important. As a reader, when I think about painting, I do not find the blank paper to be extraordinary in any way, but with a whole sentence describing it in this paragraph, it must be a big deal inside the mental institution.
Kesey shifts abruptly throughout the book from one setting to another. There are flashbacks and hallucinations sprinkled within each chapter. At the beginning of the novel, I found these random changes distracting and interruptive, but now I enjoy them. Kesey always has a reason for Chief Bromden’s flashbacks and hallucinations. Usually, they connect to what is happening or being discussed at that time inside the present-day mental hospital. The excerpt above does not have any major shift, however it does mention the Combine, which is also featured in many hallucinations previously.
Kesey includes a blend of humor and horror in this novel. There are funny parts, generally involving McMurphy and his jokes, but the whole book is not just full of humor. When Chief Bromden has his dreams, a frightening image of the Combine is created. The men are all fearful of Nurse Ratched and her powers to punish them.
I think choosing Chief Bromden as the narrator was a brilliant idea by Kesey. Chief Bromden pretends to be deaf and mute, so none of the characters are worried about what they say or do in front of him. He sees and hears almost everything that happens in the mental hospital, and is able to see everyone when they are being their true selves, not just how they act for everyone else.
“The Wheelers swing dead log legs out on the floor and wait like seated statues for somebody to roll chairs in to them. The Vegetables piss the bed, activating an electric shock and buzzer, rolls them off on the tile where the black boys can hose them down and get them in clean greens….”
Kesey is an incredible writer and his mind has unreachable enthusiasm and originality in creating, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, such a terrific novel. Kesey seems to be quite an interesting being. I often wonder of his health when reading through this novel. Has he had similar occurrences throughout his life? I wonder who Nurse Ratched relates to from his life and why he chose to make her seem like the bad guy? Besides the questions, Kesey has constructed an amazing piece of work.
From the very beginning of his work, I could pick up the amazing word choice and placement. His word choice is phenomenal. The use of adjectives and metaphors throughout the novel has really guided me to a place of better understanding. Among many other authors, Kesey is uncomparable. He is very intelligent in the placement of his words and using specific sentence structures in the right places. When writing pieces of art, one needs to be very attentive to the details. Placement really helps to emphasis the point that Kesey is trying to get across.
Kesey is a very descriptive writer. I am very appreciative of how he has not simply told us what is going on. In the excerpt above, you can clearly see the description being displayed. The amount of description makes a novel much more exciting and easier to read. Throughout this book, I have imagined many jolted images. One of which including Chief Bromden’s dream of Blastic, one of the vegetables, being sliced open with a scalpel.
Something I have found very unique about Ken Kesey’s novel is the shift in narration. I really enjoy how each character has their own personality that is really quite simple to recognize. For example, Billy Bibbit. He has a stutter. I mean his name says it all. I even stutter when reading it. Billy B-b-b-b-ibbit.
I find the humor and horror that Kesey uses is quite intriguing. Right from the get go, McMurphy arrives and he is all happy-go-lucky. He is walking straight into an a sane asylum yet is still cheerful. Everyone who is in the ward already is set to a very strict schedule and is very frightened by this new personality in which they are being exposed to. This point in the book is very important. I believe that it sets the stage for the rest of the novel.
I have actually enjoyed reading this novel and I cannot wait to read more of Kesey’s work.
Andrews 6
“I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.” (8)
This quote is said by Chief Bromden at the end of the first chapter, on page eight. I think Kesey is a fantastic writer to make Chief Bromden the narrator of the story. Bromden is probably the most reliable narrator versus any other patient because he pretends to be deaf and dumb which allows him to eavesdrop on conversations to obtain secret staff information that is kept from the other patients. Bromden is telling the story about his own journey toward sanity which makes him not only the narrator, but also the author. This technique used by Kesey is genius, it makes the story more believable because it seems to becoming from a patient in a psychiatric ward. From the quote above, we learn that Bromden has a story and it is going to be difficult for him to tell. In the quote it says to keep an open mind. His hallucinations provide insight into the hidden realities of the hospital and why they should not be overlooked. The opening lines of the novel and also the last sentence of Chief Bromden’s plea (“But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”) gives readers an idea of how severe Bromden’s paranoia is and also a sense that he is not seeing things from an everyday, normal perspective. The fact that Kesey decided to let the readers have a glimpse into Bromden’s mind is brilliant. It is almost as if we are overhearing his private thoughts, which makes readers think more in depth as to what some of the stranger items could actually symbolize. In my opinion, this is the best part about Bromden being the narrator; he makes the reader stop and really think about what is happening. For example, “What the Chronics are--or most of us--are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.” (16). Chief Bromden’s description of a chronic was surreal to me because he was comparing humans to machines. This excerpt made me think about how society tries to shape us in almost everything we do today and if we do not conform to society, we are scene as the outcast. With this being said, are chronics the nonconformists of society? Or since we all have flaws no matter how hard we try to hide them from the world, are we all chronics to a certain extent?
“She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes that door when i'm in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more. I know she’s suspicious. I thought she might be too upset by the way McMurphey defied her to pay any attention to me, but she don't look shook at all. She’s clear-headed and wondering now just how did Mr. Bromden hera that acute mcmurphey asking him to raise his hand on that vote? She’s wondering how did she know too down his mop and go sit with the Acutes in from of the TV set? None of the other Chromics did that. She’s wondering if it isn't time we did some checking on our Mr. Bromden (152).”
Kesey is by far the most prestige writer of a book I have ever read. I do not read many books but the few I have read this one tops them all. The way Kesey uses Bromden as the narrator is creative in multiple ways. Bromden is a paranoid schizophrenia, this giving him imagines that would not be seen through any other narrator. Also he is perceived as deaf; however, he can hear like an owl, yet nobody knows, this is what makes him a fabulous narrator. Through out the book, Kesey uses Bromden for a powerful description of the commotion going on around him. Word choice, to me, can make or break an intense or humorous paragraph or sentence. When Kesey through Bromden says. “She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her…” This is a intense sentence and the reason it is intense is because the way Bromden describes her eyes looking at him. The word “stabs” puts multiple images in my head of the way she is looking at him. Kesey does this in many other paragraphs and sentences that makes us as readers want to picture it in our head, so we do. Throughout this whole book and the paragraph above I feel like I am immersed in this book as one of the patients because I feel like I am there. Kesey is putting so many vivid words in his text that makes it stand out tremendously. The way Kesey makes a dramatic scene go from suspenseful to relaxed is quite humorous and a stress reliever. In the paragraph above I think the end is a humorous sentence because when I read that I feel that it is sarcastic and adds a sense of humour to that intense paragraph. Another example would be of Ruckley when he says F*** da wife, when he says this it is in the meetings where everything is intense and uncomfortable, I assume Kesey does this to add amusement to the reader and to make an awkward suspenseful situation quite humorous. Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has opened my eyes to amazing literature that I have not experienced before. This book is amazing and I am enjoying the book, I cannot wait to see what else there is to discover about this phenomenal book.
“She lets me slip through the door and stabs me again with both eyes as I go past her, closes the door when I’m in and locks it, and pivots around and glares at me some more. I know she’s suspicious. I thought she might be too upset by the way McMurphy defied her to pay attention to me, but she don’t look shook at all. She’s clearheaded and wondering now just how did Mr. Bromden hear that acute McMurphy asking him to raise his hand on that vote? She’s wondering how did he know to lay down his mop and go sit with the Acutes in front of that TV set? None of the other Chronics did that. She's wondering if it isn’t time we did some checking on our Mr. Chief Bromden.” (pg. 152)
Ken Kesey is a brilliant writer for a multitude of reasons. In this excerpt alone one can find many of those reasons, one being his word choice. In his writing, instead of saying “and she stared at me as I go past her,” Kesey says that the nurses eyes “stabed” Bromden. As a writer he is trying to make his readers feel the hatred coming from Nurse Ratched that Chief Bromden is feeling. So rather than using basic wording, Kesey chooses to make your imagination and senses explode with his powerful words. Within that same sentence (the first one of the paragraph), instead of listing the nurse’s actions in a list with commas being properly used-- he uses the word “and”. I believe Kesey uses and instead to show emphasis, that the Nurse is a force to be reckoned with and that her movements are so important at the time that they need just that extra bit of attention drawn to each of them. One thing throughout the book that in a way awes me is that throughout his writing, and Kesey’s portrayal of Bromden, at points it seems like its an omniscient narrator that is not a character at all but rather just a narrator. And as soon as you start to feel that way-- you are ripped back into the ward by some of Bromden’s actions or by his thoughts. But in this particular piece, Kesey shows his blend of horror and humor in the fact that all eyes are on the Big Nurse waiting to see how she’ll react to the day’s happenings, and the topic that should be at hand is the independent and rowdy McMurphy, but rather her thoughts are pointed towards the big, deaf, and dumb guy who may or may not actually be deaf and dumb like they’ve spent the last 20 years or so believing. So as a reader I am waiting to see what she’ll do to all of them, but then have to laugh at the fact that they’re all just beginning to catch on to the Chief.
“My name is McMurphy, buddies, R. P. McMurphy, and I’m a gambling fool.” He winks and sings a little piece of a song: “ ‘... and whenever I meet with a deck a cards I lays … my money ... down,’” and laughs again (11).”
I believe that Ken Kesey is a terrific writer. The very first thing that pops out to me when I read one of Kesey’s passages is the word choice. While using simple utterances that seem very realistic for patients of a high class mental ward and containment facility, Kesey makes me believe that I am sitting next to Chief Bromden, or betting my last cigarette on a low flush that I subconsciously know will somehow be beaten by a hand so close to mine, it is only greater in points through the sheer willpower of R. P. McMurphy, the crazy Irish gambler. Not conventionally punctuated, Kesey weaves a web of words very similar in style to that of the pidgin language, with words spelled phonetically, and unreadable unless sounded out loud. I find that this style of writing is very much additive to the subject and the narrator of the book, allowing for an even more immersive experience. And the book is truly an experience, like a religious retreat, or a tab of acid. This book will changes how one thinks, making our perceptions of reality slip and slide around like children in a soapy bath tub. It is only when the book finally comes to an end that the Glug Glug Glug of the bathwater spiralling down the drain reminds us of who we really are, and what reality we live in. The blend of horror and humor serves to shock us every. single. time. Just when we begin to believe that we have a solid grip on the tail of this tabby, she spins around and sinks her claws into our soft flesh, searing a warning into our brain by way of salty tears streaming down our crestfallen visages. Just when we think that this cat truly resents the very notion of our existence in this time and physical plane, she’ll slink by, rubbing her sides on the hem of your faded jeans. You think, “Oh no, I know what you’re doing. You’ll not make a fool out of me.” And so you resist the mounting temptation to slide your hand down onto her soft back, and sweep your arm along her spine, unwittingly making peace with her. Eventually, you’ll allow her onto the couch you are reclining in, smoothly stroking behind her ears. And suddenly, she strikes, searing pain, agony, mistrust and self-loathing all at once. But you keep coming back, time and time again, because in the moment petting that cat feels so good that you completely forget about all the time that you have been hurt, or betrayed. She is the horror and the humor, and you keep coming back for more, every time shocked and sickened by what you’ve seen, but ever craving more, More, MORE. Kesey holds the string above that cat, points the laser that makes it jump. Kesey is the mastermind behind every move, the general sacrificing his front line to win the day. And Kesey is each and every one of us. Our suppressed rebellion, our longing for connection, our need for approval: Kesey found a part of all of us, and crafted a book that is the human race.
Part 1
“Right now, she’s got the fog machine switched on, and it’s rolling in so fast I can’t see a thing but her face, rolling in thicker and thicker, and I feel as hopeless and dead as I felt happy a minute ago, when she gave that little jerk - even more hopeless than ever before, on account of I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can’t help anymore than I could. Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in. And I’m glad when it gets thick enough you’re lost in it and can let go, and be safe again” (113).
Kesey is a marvelous author who expertly narrates the book through Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic Native American. While Chief Bromden is not always a reliable narrator, he is able to provide the reader an inside look into the daily happenings of the mental institution. Everything that the reader learns about the hospital is through Chief Bromden’s perspective, which may or may not be entirely true. For example, the Chief sometimes goes into a fog as described in the excerpt above. When this occurs, he has retreated into his “safe zone” where everything he sees going on is disillusioned, making him an unreliable narrator. Kesey’s word choice is impeccable throughout the whole novel. He does not always use highly technical and profound words, but instead, Kesey uses words that would be thought of in Chief Bromden’s mind, as well as words that would come out of each patient and staff’s mouth based on their own personality. Each word is placed carefully to ensure that the story is believable.
Chief Bromden’s narration often allows the reader to have an image in their mind of what is happening in both the hospital and Chief’s mind. For example, when the patients are all playing cards with McMurphy, the reader can get a clear picture in his or her mind of what is going on based on Chief Bromden’s description. Kesey also allows the reader to get a clear picture of what is going in Chief Bromden’s mind as well. When he goes into his fog, he often sees and dreams things that are not real. The one night when Chief Bromden did not take his sleeping pill, he had a terrible dream that conjured up horrifying images in the reader’s mind. “The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there’s no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see - just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass” (88). Kesey also allows for different narrations to take place throughout the book. At times, just Chief Bromden is narrating through what he observes, and at other times, the whole group is narrating when they are all taking part in a conversation or meeting. Chief does not speak, so Kesey includes the other patients’ and staffs’ conversations to add dialogue to the story. This allows for variation to occur in the novel, and it adds more reliability to the story by having more than one person telling it from just his point of view.
Part 2
Kesey is also able to blend humor and horror in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. McMurphy is the main source of the humor in the novel, as he starts laughing the moment he enters the hospital. This is the first time in years that the patients have heard someone truly laugh. Nurse Ratched is an evil character whose only goal is to get the men conformed enough to go back into society. Often this is done through many Electro Shock Therapies. McMurphy is able to bring humor to this horror with his attempts to bring down her evil reign. For example, he walks around one morning with just a towel on his waist. When Nurse Ratched sees him, she becomes very flustered and tells him that he needs to go put his clothes back on. Instead, McMurphy takes the towel off, and Nurse Ratched finds out that he has boxers on underneath. This flusters her even further and causes the other patients to take delight in the whole scene. I believe that Kesey is a wonderful author, especially when it comes to his descriptions of the happenings of the hospital and his narration of the story through Chief Bromden.
“It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before. I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit’s stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it’s so thick. In fact it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while. Floating makes me a little sick to the stomach at first. I can’t see a thing. I never had it so thick it floated me like this” (133). This far into the novel, Kesey has provided the reader with multiple hallucinations with our narrator Chief Bromden. The fog that Bromden’s world is engulfed in is a symbol for the powerlessness of the patients. On page 133, the patients are having a daily group therapy circle. This is when they are most vulnerable to the big nurse’s dominance. Kesey gives us Bromden’s worst psychotic episode yet just as McMurphy is starting to stir things up. The Chief exclaims that he is hearing the conversation as if through water. This word choice explains to the reader how severe his hallucination is. In this moment, Bromden is at his most helpless, floating along and hiding in his fog. Kesey shifts his narrative technique he starts the chapter with a stable, clear minded Bromden then drastically changes his narration to a foggy, immobile, floating Chief. With this story taking place in a mental ward of the hospital where men never laugh, humor can be lacking. This passage does not have deliberate humor from Kesey. If one looks at the whole idea of Bromden getting lost in his own mind, that would seem more morose than funny. But if you take it literally, and picture the Chief floating along in fog, it eases the situation. Kesey makes a large man with a mental illness turn into a weightless object floating through his own mind. Kesey allows us to empathize with Bromden but also creates a comical scene.
"During the meeting a few days before he asks if it wouldn't be okay if they did the cleaning work at night, during TV time, and watched the games during the afternoon. The nurse tell him no, which is about what he expected. She tells him how the schedule has been set up for a delicately balanced reason that would be thrown into turmoil by the switch of routines. This doesn't surprise him, coming from the nurse; what does surprise him is how the Acutes act when he asks them what they think of the idea. Nobody says a thing. They're all sunk back out of sight in little pockets of fog. I can barely see them. "Now look here," he tells them but they don't look. He's been waiting for somebody to say something, answer his question. Nobody acts like they've heard it. "Look her, damn it," he says when nobody moves, "there's at least twelve of you guys I know of myself got a leetle personal interest who wins these games. Don't you guys care to watch them?"(118).
I think Kesey does a phenomenal job showing the hatred between McMurphy and Ms. Ratched. That excerpt shows how power hungry and controlling Ms. Ratched really is. Earlier in the book Kesey shows another argument McMurphy and Ms. Ratched get into. Ms. Ratched and some of the patients including McMurphy sit down to talk, McMurphy explains that he and the doctor had talk about the situation involving some of the patients being able to play cards in the tub room. Kesey describes Ms. Ratched to be very irritated but she keeps a smile on her face he also. There is a great amount of humor in the book also that makes the reader not want to the book down.
"Right now, she's got the fog machine switched on, and it's rolling in so fast I can't see a thing but her face, rolling in thicker and thicker, and I feel as hopeless and dead as i felt happy a minute ago, when she gave that little jerk -- even more hopeless than ever before, on account of I know now there is no real help against her or her Combine. McMurphy can't help anymore than I could. Nobody can help. And the more I think about how nothing can be helped, the faster the fog rolls in"(113). Personally, I do not believe Ken Kesey is an author to be revered. Kesey creates unreliable narrators, making me highly frustrated with his writing. Chief Bromden, the main character and narrator, has schizophrenia. Schizophrenics are know for experiencing bats of hallucinations and paranoia. This is not the type of person I want to be telling me information about the characters. No one can truly know that anything Chief Bromden sees or speaks about is real. They could all be in his head: the Combine, the residents, the black boys, and Nurse Ratched. His senses are skewed and doubt able. Much of the time, it is difficult to discern symbolism from hallucination. We may see a symbol within Kesey's book, but instead of McMurphy's hands symbolizing strength, they could be just hands. Chief Bromden plays deaf and dumb. This makes it difficult for me to realize what kind of a person Bromden is. He doesn't socialize with the other patients, so you never know what he would do if he actually participated. He could be rude or kind. His book, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", differs greatly from other works because of its odd narration and chapter lengths, but Kesey himself is a cuckoo. He was often know to participate in drug use. Many speculate that he was high while writing his most famous novel. Ken Kesey uses odd word choice and placement. He has very short paragraphs adjacent to exceptionally long ones. His word choice is easily understandable to the average reader. I believe Kesey used such astonishing imagery because, when one is high, they often see bizarre visions and see their normal, everyday objects as fantastic pieces of wonderment. This allowed him to write graphically and large. Kesey does not give euphemized versions of what he envisions. The author's blending of humor and horror is most likely used to show that the residents are bonkers. They see horrific instances but tend to slough them off and sometimes even make a joke out of them.
(Page 142) “It’s too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with his hand so it won’t act like I order it … I wouldn’t do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I’m in for trouble, but I can’t stop it. McMurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires…”
I chose this quote for a plethora of reasons. This quote is at the most climactic point in all of part 1. Nurse Ratched has been beaten! The word choice is Kesey uses is phenomenal. “It’s too late to stop it now.” Chief Bromden believes he hasn’t any control whatsoever of his own body. It’s evident he has overcome another episode during the group discussion. Chief Bromden always tries to remain in the shadows, but against his own willpower McMurphy has overtaken his body and now Nurse Ratched has a watchful eye on Bromden considering he was the deciding vote. Kesey creates an exceptional narrative technique where he continues to transition from hallucinations to reality. Kesey does this to the point where many readers are left puzzled whether something is actually happening or not. In this case, it is clear McMurphy doesn’t have actual control over him, but does McMurphy possess a mental hold on Chief Bromden? I think the answer is yes. “McMurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it”, Kesey let’s the reader decide what “it” is. Yes, it is more than likely his arm that McMurphy is controlling yet, it creates an even more interesting narrative. Kesey does this numerous times throughout the novel. I feel as though in this climactic point, Kesey transitioned the power from Nurse Ratched to McMurphy. As Chief Bromden would always like to stay in the shadows and follow the rules while taking everything in that he sees around him, now, he is unable to do so because McMurphy withholds more power in the ward rather than Nurse Ratched. My favorite part in this quote is when Kesey places McMurphy in this magical light. Chief Bromden had a “hex” placed on him. It seems as though these poor residents are so clueless that places of authority seem supernatural to them. They try their best to follow the rules, but in the end they have no jurisdiction of the actions they commit. It is simply all to follow the system that is in place. When McMurphy has the power, the residents follow despite chance at punishment from Nurse Ratched.
Palmer 3
Ken Kesey, a truly phenomenal writer, encourages the reader to look deeper into the true meaning of his work. From the very beginning of the novel, Kesey describes the mental hospital which Chief Bromden is trapped in using a variety of senses. He writes, “When the fog clears to where I can see, I’m sitting in the day room. . . . I can call to mind some mornings locked in Seclusion the black boys keep bringing seconds of everything--supposed to be for me, but they eat it instead--till all three of them get breakfast while I lie there on that pee-stinking mattress, watching them wipe up egg with toast. I can smell the grease and hear them chew the toast. Other mornings they bring me cold mush and force me to eat it without it even being salted” (9). While this paragraph seems inconsequential to the story as a whole, it is indeed very important to introducing the setting and conditions of the hospital. Here, Kesey describes what Chief Bromden is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Reading the passage, one almost experiences all of these pungent senses.
Another way in which Kesey captures the reader is by constantly keeping them on their toes. His paragraphs can jolt from one subject to the next, and while seemingly random, there is meaning behind this. Shortly after the meeting, McMurphy has finally convinced Harding and the other patients that Nurse Ratched is evil, and they begin placing bets. Then, the very next chapter, Kesey opens with a figure, who closely resembles Santa Claus, being taken into the institution. It reads: “One Christmas at midnight on the button, at the old place, the ward door blows open with a crash, in comes a fat man with a beard, eyes ringed red by the cold and his nose just the color of a cherry” (76). Later on, this new patient even says “Ho ho ho . . . I’d like to stay but I must be hurrying along. Very tight schedule, ya know. Ho ho. Must be going . . .” (76). While this sudden shift seems odd and confusing to the reader, there is meaning behind it. Shortly before Santa, the characters were just coming to the conclusion that Nurse Ratched is, indeed, not kind and caring. Then, it shifts to a scene symbolizing Nurse Ratched’s control. This scene is important because it shows that Nurse Ratched can capture/conform anyone, even the beloved Santa.
While writing about a mental institution, with scenes of rape and death, there is a need for comic relief in the novel. Kesey uses McMurphy, a rather obnoxious and loud character, to lighten the mood of the story. In fact, McMurphy is the only character in the novel who has actually laughed (other than a small grin or snigger). McMurphy allows comic relief throughout the novel.
Eichelberg-6
My first observation or reaction to this novel is overwhelmingly awe. I gape at the book in wonder because I know my unskilled thoughts could never come up with such a deep and thought provoking piece of literature. I think the way Kesey put this book together is similar to a brilliant abstract artist. Abstract art can be interpreted any number of ways based upon the observer, just as Cuckoos Nest could be interpreted thousands of ways by different readers. It leaves so much for the reader to conceive themselves and there is a sort of extremely artistic nature oozing from that. I think the words he uses come at exactly the right times. It is no secret that Kesey is brilliant and so when the reader sees a word that is messed up they can only assume that he intends the reader to find a small clue he has hidden there. The images his words produce almost give me the feel of hallucinating. To imagine the repetitively crazy sights by Chief Bromden gives the reader a sense of being in his topsy-turvy, shifting world along with him. Kesey goes into extensive descriptions of the scenes he portrays and the small trigger words he uses to describe things can once again lead the reader into picking up small verbal cues Kesey is trying to make. This is especially one scene that stands out visually to me as I can see how thick the fog is when Chief Bromden explains “...already the mist is oozing across the floor so thick my pants legs are wet...that’s why she’s foggin the ward for the meeting...the doctor coming through the door wiping his glasses like he thinks the blurred look comes from his steamed lenses instead of the fog. It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before...it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while.” (133). I have never read another author who can transition so quickly. One minute Kesey has me tearing up out of sheer pity and the next I am laughing at some crazy antics deployed by one of the men. For being in a mental hospital Kesey sure does make the reader forget sometimes, but I think that it is not only for comedic relief, but artistic purpose. I believe every time Kesey makes the reader laugh he is lulling them farther and farther into a false sense of security. As if the ward is not as awful as it is made out to be and the reader should just contentedly browse the pages forgetting that as all things, there is an end and in this book there is no way to have a happy ending.
“There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs--hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait” (129).
Ken Kesey is a terrific writer because of his extremely clever use of symbolism. Many themes and ideas of this novel are not directly stated; the reader has to read between the lines to determine them. What makes Kesey’s work so fascinating is that every word he uses is carefully thought through and has a double meaning. Chief Bromden is an unreliable narrator. As a paranoid schizophrenic, his view of the world is often inaccurate. He loses himself in his own psychotic fog, sees and hears things that do not exist, and sees everything that happens around him as a calculated act, all controlled by the Combine. However, his being unreliable does not make him a bad narrator. While the reader does sometimes have to determine what is real and what is a figment of Bromden’s paranoid imagination, even his delusions add to the overall themes and mood of the story. Kesey’s word choice throughout this novel makes the reader feel that they truly are being told a story by Chief Bromden, not by an accomplished and educated writer. This excerpt demonstrates this; the descriptions are rambling and disorganized, just as Chief Bromden’s thoughts often are. The mood of the story changes depending on shifts in the narrators mood; when he feels hopeful, things are described as lighter and more humorous, whereas when he feels lost and alone, everything is dark and haunting. In addition, Kesey manages to make even the dark and haunting portions of the novel humorous. Kesey’s discussion of gore and intestines and body parts are formulated in a way that makes them less gruesome and more symbolic and silly. His terrific symbolism is what makes him a fantastic writer. Even in this excerpt, which could be seen as just a nightmare or paranoid delusion, is a reference to the matriarchy of Nurse Ratched, for even Rawler’s suicide is accomplished through castration. He takes away his own manhood to escape Nurse Ratched, who does the same.
“The table shaped like a cross, with shadows of a thousand murdered men printed on it, silhouette wrists and ankles running under leather straps sweated green with use, a silhouette neck and head running up to a silver band goes across the forehead. And a technician at the controls beside the table pointing at me with a rubber glove. ‘Wait, I know that big bastard there--better rabbit-punch him or call for some more help or something. He’s an awful case for thrashing around.’” (132)
Ken Kesey’s writing is unique and mind boggling. Reading his work is like visiting an art museum, everything is different yet gives you outstanding and beautiful pictures. He has a way of making a book his own in every aspect possible. He does not follow “guidelines” like most authors do. His literature compares to Lady Gaga’s music. Lady Gaga does not follow current trends or styles. She makes everything her very own. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey uses a plethora of italics and difficult vocabulary that is easy to understand at the same time. Adding italics to his writing gives reader an idea of what is important. It tells the readers to emphasize a particular word that is important to the sentence or paragraph. This novel is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden. Bromden is a gentle man who enjoys eavesdropping on the workers and other patients. He does this by pretending that he is deaf. What a character to have narrate! He picked a gentle man to be the storyteller in a world of chaos and confusion. Kesey uses this to his advantage by often times switching the perspective. Within the book, there are certain times when Kesey changes the narrator. I personally believe he does this to give the reader a better understanding of the feelings of the other characters in the book, not just Chief Bromden. Using this strategy is extremely effective, for me anyways. Another useful strategy that Kesey uses is blending together humor along with the horror. Psychiatric Wards are often pictured as very scary places in horror films and other entertainment, but Kesey finds a way to make the ward less scary by placing in different humorous lines and parts throughout the book. McMurphy will say something funny or do something completely outrageous, like singing at the top of his lungs while the other patients are still asleep, and it lightens the mood up tremendously. Confusion will first arise when you begin to read Kesey's book, but after digging deeper into his literary strategies you begin to understand and comprehend it on a whole new level.
Experimental author Ken Kesey took quite a few artistic liberties in regard to how fiction was typically written. Using an unreliable narrator and flawed grammar the reader is made to read between the lines to fully grasp the novel. Another way Kesey experimented with his writing is varying the lengths of chapters. He uses the standard 10-15 page chapters most often, but also slips in several very short chapters of only a paragraph. An example of a chapter written this way is: “There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs--hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy is sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait” (129). That is the entire chapter, succeeding a chapter in approximately equal length. Beyond the length of the chapter, the content is also intriguing. Kesey’s word choice gives the narrator, Chief Bromden, more depth. The way Chief narrates does not sound like his word were written by a Stanford graduate, but is written as one would expect a grown, lesser educated man to speak. Words like “guy,” “nuts,” and “can” attribute to this. Chief does not seem to be concerned that Rawler has committed suicide (in a horrific way) but that he was impatient. Chief seems unaffected by the thought of death; it’s just a part of life that happens and cannot be helped. Chief does not understand why anyone would take their own life, because it will happen naturally, if they just wait. Chief does not seem to feel grief for Rawler, just a lack of understanding. The majority of the imagery in this brief chapter is jolting. A delivery of hearts, kidneys, and brains? I question Chief’s reliability on this, as I cannot imagine they are doing transplants in the ward, but I can see how based on Chief’s other beliefs as to what is going on in the ward might cause him to think that they switch out patient’s hearts and brains. A new heart to make a sensitive man tough; a new brain to make an incompetent man intelligent. The most horrific of the images is not imagining a man sitting on a toilet and cutting his own testicles off, but imagining people around him completely unaware of what is going on. It seems almost unfeasible that not a soul noticed him until he fell on the floor, already dead. Comparing this scene to the scene Kesey conjures in Nurse Ratched’s ward, one questions how the head nurse of that floor did not notice. Ratched is always on constant watch, but perhaps she runs her floor different than other nurses. Also interesting about this event, is the fact that Rawler has essentially emasculated himself, something the ward, namely Nurse Ratched, has been doing to the patients. It is interesting that he does this to himself, perhaps not wanting to wait for it to be forcefully done. This makes Chief’s quandary about why he was impatient deeper yet, as Rawler may have thought he would be better off emasculating, and killing, himself. It may have seemed more honorable to do himself in, rather than having his life forcefully ended. A final note of Kesey’s fantastic writing ability is his use of comedic humor. It’s less what happened and more how it is told. “Cut both nuts off,” is made less serious with the use of “nuts” and lack of proper grammatical structure. At the same time, it’s horrific way to commit suicide. I would assume incredibly painful, and it would not have killed him instantly. He would have had to have been in excruciating pain as others completely ignored him in his final breaths.
“There’s long spells--three days, years-- when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog. When I can see, the guys are usually moving around as unconcerned as though they didn't notice so much as a mist in the air. I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn't affect mine” (117).
I believe Kesey is a great author because of his diverse sentence structures and word choices. I think the word choice in this excerpt clearly articulates the mood it is trying to portray. By using the word clanging, it shows how the speaker is not making a good noise, but an annoying, almost obnoxious noise. The “jolting” image is it trying to show in this excerpt, is an eerie scene of a buoy in a midnight fog. It makes it seem like Chief Bromden knows more about the fog than the other guys. Kesey adds this scene to make it seem like the ward is eerie and almost uneasy for Chief Bromden, because the other guys are moving “unconcerned” because they don’t notice it as much as Chief Bromden does. The time span in which Chief Bromden thinks it has been, shows how unaware of time he actually is. Kesey shows this by the sentence, “There’s long spells--three days, years.” It goes from a short amount of time (three days) to a long period of time (years) in which Chief Bromden is unaware of how long it had been. Kesey also shows how this can lead to Chief Bromden being a unreliable yet all knowing narrator. Chief Bromden remarks, “I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn't affect mine.” Kesey uses these words to show how the narrator isn't in the fog (or he thinks) as much as his fellow Chronics are.
“There were times that week when I’d hear that full throttled laugh, watch him scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as natural as drawing breath, and I'd quit worrying about the Big Nurse and the combine behind her. I’d think he was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. Maybe that makes him strong enough, being what he is. The Combine hasn’t got to him in all these years; what makes that nurse think she’s gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him.”(161)
Kesey is a marvelously unique writer who never lets us forget how McMurphy will never be broken down and be crushed by the combine. He brings up over and over again throughout the book that McMurphy is a strong man and will not be manufactured into what some of the other patients of the ward have become. Kesey shows us that McMurphy shows his toughness not only in his image but alongside the psychoanalytical factor as well. McMurphy attempts to keep the ward relaxed with his constant laughter bellowing throughout the whole floor and this greatly helps keep the spirits alive within the patients. This is very different to what Nurse Ratched is used to. Kesey didn’t just give the Big Nurse a standard name. He gave her a name that sounds wicked and commanding. It greatly reminds me of the tool a ratchet. That is used to keep things nice, tight, and in order. Which she was succeeding in up until McMurphy came along. Kesey uses McMurphy to try and switch the Nurse’s gears around and try and make her loosen the reins a bit. It is also shown that if she doesn’t McMurphy becomes a crow bar and pries and Nurse Ratched until it becomes loose or breaks.
Kesey then obviously makes McMurphy the comic relief in this book with his big jolly laugh and always trying to get the other patients to loosen up and ‘pry’ free from the Combine. He is trying to clog up the combine and save as many patients as he can with his jolly attitude and rolling laughter. Kesey describes Nurse Ratched just as I have pictured freaky thoughts and horror movies that I have seen in the past. Kesey tells you that she has a smile plastered on her face that is rarely ever removed, but underneath it is a fire burning in her head of how she will make the life more miserable to the patients. Kesey has Nurse Ratched make the patients believe they have the right, but allows her to play the card that Nurse Ratched knows best.
Ken Kesey is obviously a brilliant writer, but how he traps the readers of his novels, that is amazing. He applies italicized words in the perfect spots to emphasize what he wants. The words he italicized can be spoken by any one of the characters. An example of this is when McMurphy gets Nurse Ratched’s goat: “Mr. McMurphy, I’m warning you!... You are under the jurisdiction of me...under Jurisdiction and control” (144). Kesey emphasized these words to imply how stressed and angry Nurse Ratched was with McMurphy. When Harding eventually follows McMurphy to the blank TV set, she almost explodes with anger: “Mr. Har-ding! … you men--Stop this. Stop!” (144). Kesey has never before used an exclamation point when Nurse Ratched was talking. The application of the exclamation point clearly displays Ratched’s anger and frustration.
Also, Ken Kesey stops part 1 with a cliffhanger, a hook to catch the reader like a fish. After part 1 was finished, I had to read more. Great authors can sort of hypnotize their readers to read more and more.
Ken Kesey writes with vivid imagery, making the scenes clearer in the readers mind. When Chief Bromden imagines the fog and the machinery that creates the fog, we get little taste of what the chief goes through all the time. Chief talks about how he becomes lost in the fog and how he tries to escape but never can. How McMurphy is out of the fog/mist and trying to pull the other patients out with him. “No? You, Chief, what about you? He’s standing over me in the mist. Why won’t he leave me be?” (142). Kesey elicits Bromden’s uneasiness with the whole situation, but also shows how Bromden should not be with the chronics either. He understands McMurphy and voted against the Big Nurse.
With all the horrors occurring in the cuckoo’s nest, there is one spot of humor and life. Randle P. McMurphy is comical at times and is almost a comic relief from the dreariness of ward life. Kesey adds a little bit of humor when McMurphy has the sperm whale underwear on. Nurse Ratched can’t stand to see them in her big machine, combine. We, the readers, all are rooting for McMurphy and Chief Bromden to win in the end. We also want the Big Nurse to lose. We will find out soon enough.
“Even Cheswick could understand it and didn’t hold anything against McMurphy for not going ahead and making a big fuss over the cigarettes. He came back down from Disturbed on the same day that the nurse broadcast the information to the beds, and he told McMurphy himself that he could understand how he acted and that it was surely the sharpest thing to do, considering, and that if he’d thought about Mack being committed he’d never have put him on the spot like he had the other day. He told McMurphy this while we were all being taken over to the swimming pool. But must as soon as we got to the pool he said he did wish something mighta been done, though, and dove into the water. And got his finger stuck some way in the grate that’s over the drain at the bottom of the pool, and neither the big lifeguard nor McMurphy nor the two black boys could pry him loose, and by the time they got a screwdriver and undid the grate and brought Cheswick up, with the grate and brought Cheswick up, with the grate still clutched by his chubby pink and blue fingers, he was drowned. (174-175)”
Kesey, the author of Cuckoo’s Nest, brilliantly narrates the tale through Chief Bromden of a half native descent who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Throughout the novel, Bromden experiences the events at the ward along with plenty of hallucinations occurring such as the fog, the machines in the wall, and his dreams. Kesey’s characters interact and develop the story in such an interesting manner creating a novel that is hard to put down to say the least. I love how this book began, “They’re out there. (3)” Just three subtle words that most people hear in everyday life, but the way they are put together creates an aura of mystery and paranoia. I have enjoyed the interactions between Harding and McMurphy the most of any character, Harding always has very sly comments, and can manipulate McMurphy a bit, but both are great friends and help each other out. McMurphy getting Harding out of being harassed by Nurse Ratched, and Harding explaining to McMurphy that he’s committed unlike most of the patients in the ward. When Kesey introduces those pages that have just a sentence or two, such as pages 128, 129, and 181, it changes the pace of the book, but they hold powerful meanings too. I enjoy the passage I chose. The passage I chose was the death of Cheswick. In the scene he forgave McMurphy for not backing him up, but he ultimately committed suicide in this scene. As shocking and devastating the event was, the passage itself seemed upbeat, even poking fun at Cheswick’s chubby fingers after he drowned and was pulled up from the bottom of the pool. I believe this scene was very important because symbolically and literally Cheswick pulled off the gate opening up the drain. Kesey’s subtle hints foreshadowing has excited me for what may come.
“There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs--hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait.”
While reading this particular excerpt from the novel, I have began to question Kesey’s mental state. Kesey had to of come from a dark place in order to right such a twisted paragraph. Nonetheless, whether he came from a twisted place or not, Kesey is extremely brilliant. I believe Kesey’s intelligence has completely made me question mine. While reading, I have to stop, and asking myself if this is really happening or not. I find it quite hard to differentiate between hallucinations and the real story line. For instance, did Old Rawler really cut his nuts off? Part of me wants to say no because of the disturbance of that image, but another part of me greatly believes it actually happened. Why wouldn’t they kill themselves? Impatience is all mental, and when most of these gentlemen are mentally ill, they don’t posses the patient trait. These men, I’m sure of it, convince themselves they are never going to get out, and if they don’t act on it first, the ward is going to kill them off. It is an understanding of mine that some of these men actually do enjoy the ward, and would rather die there than in the real world. What I’m trying to get at is the fact that Kesey’s word choice is so extremely sophisticated the underlying message of this book is so mind boggling that you really have to place yourself within to understand.
“It’s too late to stop it now. McMurphy did something to it that first day, put some kind of hex on it with is hand so it won’t act like I order it. There’s no sense in it, any fool can see; I wouldn’t do it on my own. Just by the way the nurse is staring at me with her mouth empty of words I can see I’m in for trouble, but I can’t stop it. McMurphy’s got hidden wires hooked to it, lifting it slow just to get me out of the fog and into the open where I’m fair game. He’s doing it, wires…
No. That’s not the truth. I lifted it myself” (142).
I think Kesey is an extraordinary writer. Not many people can pull off writing a book about a mentally-ill man and make it actually work. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is very well written and gives good insight on what it is actually like to be in the mind of a man dealing with delusional schizophrenia. Kesey experiments with many different elements in this novel and I feel as if he truly pulled it off. Word choice and word placement are two things Kesey uses to his advantage in this novel. He uses very well placed metaphors and similes and he also shows that he knows when to pull out the bigger sentences/words and when it is needed to use smaller ones. Kesey is also amazing at using imagery in his writing. One good example of this is when Chief Bromden had the dream of the room being like an elevator. That section made it easy to picture what Bromden was seeing in his dream/hallucination. Kesey also does well with using a mix of humor and horror in this novel as well. He talks about horrific things like rape, fog, hallucinations, but he is also able to easily show humorous things as well. I think he uses the humor to kind of break the horrific parts of the novel up, a bit of comic relief, so that the reader doesn't only concentrate on how horrifying some of the aspects of the novel actually is.
“Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it tell he fell off to the floor, dead” (129).
This an example of Kesey using a very disturbing image to keep the readers attention. This image obviously would be more effective towards males, but in general would create quite the visual image to anybody. This sounds like a very painful way to die and shows just how desperate he wants to die. This is just one of many examples on how Kesey uses horrific images to keep the readers attention. Who in their right mind would be able to read that sentence and not feel some kind of negative emotion? Some might even find it funny through dark humor.
This quote is also interesting because this quote occurs in a section of pages that there are several chapters and they are very short. For example, Kesey has two chapters right next to each other and each chapter is no more than a paragraph in length. He once again does this to change up the rhythm of your reading and keep the readers attention. Most authors would just keep their chapter lengths to a normal length throughout the book, but not Kesey.
“Those girls were about to take off when one looked at him and says ‘Are you the renowned Billy Club Bibbit? Of the famous fourteen inches?’ And Billy ducked his head and blushed--like he’s doin’ now-- and we were a shoo-in” (102).
This is the best example I have found so far of Kesey using humor to also keep the reader amused and focused. This example is not as dark as some of the other humor Kesey uses throughout the book. Not only does this make the reader chuckle, but it also makes the reader to want to read more and more. Maybe the reader continues to read because he wants to see if McMurphy continues the joke/story at a later date, or maybe the reader wants to keep reading to see what other humorous parts Kesey has interlaced into his book. Either way, the point is that the reader is focused and wanting to continue to read; which is exactly what Kesey wants the reader to do.
“The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there’s no blood or innards falling out like I was looking to see--just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass. Worker’s standing there to his knees in what looks like clinkers. A furnace got its mouth open somewhere, licks up somebody” (88).
I am by no means an expert on literature, so I do not know whether or not Ken Kesey is one of the greatest writers by their standards. I can say that I have enjoyed reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so far, which is not something I say of most novels I am instructed to read for a class. I especially like the way the novel is narrated. Kesey’s choice to write the novel from Chief Bromden’s point of view is interesting because Bromden is not a reliable narrator. He is, after all, in a mental ward, and his mental problems cause all sorts of weird hallucinations and dreams that a reliable, sane narrator likely would not have. The quote above is an example of such.
Another thing Kesey did well in writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was creating imagery that really frightens the reader. Again, the quote above does this. That quote in particular comes from the dream Bromden has the night he refuses his pill before falling asleep.
Kesey also excels at using diction within the novel. His word choice is excellent, and each character’s vocabulary is different from the rest. For example, Harding’s is precise and eloquent because he has a college degree, but McMurphy’s is more vulgar and slang-ridden because he is a stereotypical angry Irishman.
Finally, Kesey mixes humor and horror very well. In almost every scene, something funny happens, but while it happens, the reader can still easily tell that while it is superficially funny, there is an air of horror deeper down. For example, McMurphy calling Nurse Ratched names like “ball cutter” sounds humorous, but the reader also realizes that what Nurse Ratched has been doing to the patients to earn that nickname is awful and screws with their perceptions of how good friendships work.
Overall, Kesey may or may not be one of the greatest writers there is, but I enjoy reading his work so far.
“Not a thing but the dorm floor moves, and we’re all sliding away from the walls and door and the windows of the ward at a hell of a clip--beds, backstands, and all. The machinery--probably a cog-and-track affair at each corner of the shaft--is greased silent as death. The only sound I hear is the guys breathing and that drumming under us get louder the farther we go down.”(86)
In this excerpt, Kesey does a tremendous job describing what is going on in Chief Bromden's head. This shows how truly gifted Kesey is when it comes to writing. Using a substantial amount of imagery, I feel as if I am experiencing this phenomenon for myself. The use of hyphens in this passage, shows exactly what Bromden is thinking. Although it can be rather difficult to understand when authors use this technique, I appreciate it because it gives more insight on a particular character. Placing words in the middle of a descriptive sentence, puts emphasis on what the character is relating their thoughts to.
Although Kesey uses jolting word style, in this particular passage I feel the words are actually being dragged down with the characters; like a black hole is sucking the entire book, including the reader, into the story. Another way Kesey is a literary genius in his writing technique, is how he misspells words on purpose. Being narrated in first person, it is more intriguing if the book is written how one would think. Most of us do not usually think in our heads with outstanding grammar. This gives the reader one more way to relate to the book. Using improper grammar may also deepen the roots of the characters background rather than just writing a book. A book should be composed of more than just words on a page. A book should introduce the reader into a completely different realm of their mind. Showing them to think separately from the normal crowd, and question authority as does McMurphy. A book should fuel creativity, not demolish it. The ward is a wet towel and Ratched is ringing it out, trying to squeeze every little last drop of creativity from the patients.
The way Kesey uses the blend of humor and horror is perfect. Some novels can become very morbid and almost unreadable because of their graphic content, but Kesey blends horror into the book to create a delicate symbiosis of two very different genres. Proving another reason why Kesey is a literary juggernaut.
Kesey is an exceptionally fantastic writer mainly due to how he implemented the narrator, chief Bromden. Kesey really forces us to think about what is actually happening, he does not simply tell us what is occurring. Kesey gives us vivid imagery about the actions that are occurring, of which sometimes border on absurdity. Even though the narrator seems to be insane, we still get a sense of validity from the scenes that the narrator describes. One example of such writing is when Bromden witness one of the electro shock treatments, “I can hear him screaming. The doors open inward with a whoosh, and I can see the twinkling tubes in the room. They wheel the victim out still smoking, and I grip the bench where I sit to keep from being sucked through the door” (182). This example gives us a lot of information about the electro shock treatment, without actually stating what is going on. As a first glance, this statement may seem humorous due to Bromden not wanting to be sucked into the room the victim came out of. The image of Bromden, a brute of a man, being sucked into the room is comical at best. However, I think Kesey is really trying to say that these kind of activities happen to everyone, and they can be forced upon them at any time by the nurse. All of the patients realize what the EST treatments are and how they leave the victim afterwards. They are so intimidated by the EST treatments that they will shrink up on a bench, in order to hopefully not be seen by the workers. The only reason we can even decipher an inkling of these feelings is due to Kesey’s word choice. Kesey could have simply stated that the victim was taking out of the room, smoking. He could have stated that Bromden feared the EST treatments, however, he did not. The fact that Kesey forces us to come up with the horror ourselves amplifies the atrocity of the event. Kesey practically forces to come up with our own conclusion about Bromden’s feelings about the EST room. Kesey could have also left out the word “smoking” when he describes the victim, however, it gives us a visual representation of the victim. This enhanced representation further increases our abhorrence towards the acts that the workers commit. How Bromden reacts to the situation also tells us how these events occur frequently. Bromden does not appear to become startled by the EST. Everything Kesey writes seems to give something to the reader, I would not be surprised if I have overlooked a few of the situations throughout the book; thus missing out on some of the clues Kesey is trying to give us.
In this novel, Ken Kesey uses an assortment of fantastic imagery that is easily comprehensible on the surface, but beholds a truly different meaning below the surface. He uses his unbelievable talent for imagery to entertain the reader, and if you understand its sometimes gothic theme, you may be even be shocked and entertained even more. One of my favorite stories that Kesey/Chief Bromden tells is the story of Pete’s abnormal birth. “Pete had looked out first and seen all the delivery-room machinery waiting for him and somehow realized what he was being born into, and had grabbed onto everything handy in there to try to stave off being born” (52). This excerpt from the book brings shocking information to the reader. Of course Pere didn’t actually grab onto his mother to avert being born, but the story creates a depressing situation that the reader must think about. The author makes it seem like Pete knew about the terrible life that he would have to go through conforming to society. He knew that conforming to society was a life that he would not like to live so he tried not to live it at all, very saddening. Yet, Pete was pulled out harshly from the womb and received a horrible defect. A defect that would make it almost impossible for him to conform to society and impossible for him to be perceived as normal. Another great use of imagery is in the third chapter explaining a different view of the story. “Like a cartoon world where the figures are flat and out line in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren’t for the cartoon figures being real guys” (33). This is one of my favorite images that an author has ever conveyed to me in a novel. This is amazing because it shows that though the story has funny events, the events are real to these characters and it is horrifying for them.
Kesey uses other instruments to convey his excellent skills as an author such as word choice as well. Chief, the narrator, has a military background where he worked must have worked with machines since he seem to connect everything with it. He relates society to a Combine and explains it as the way society forces people to act in the same manner. The combine in the story is the head nurse and she determines if the patients in the ward get to leave or not. He uses excellent word choice in this novel and makes them even better by giving them another meaning as well.
Lastly, Kesey uses humor to gain attention of the reader as well as bring in a point that is not so obvious similar to how he uses his imagery. In the very start of the book you can feel the humor come from the book as well as the shocking horror as well. “Black boys in white up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them” (3). This is very funny and really brings in the reader to the opening of the book. Yet, this also might bring a shocking realization and horror to you as well. The narrator in the book, Bromden, is obviously very paranoid and crazy. It is depressing to think that the Chief has to be this afraid in the ward.
Ken Kesey is an incredibly interesting author. Kesey chose to use a man with paranoid schizophrenia as the author of the story which seem like an odd and not well planned choice to most; I thought the same thing when beginning One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest but I was proven wrong. Ken Kesey chose Chief Bromden, the only narrator suitable for this story. Bromden is in a state of incessantly pretending to be deaf and dumb is an exceedingly clever ploy to seem irrelevant to the other patients and therefore gives him an upper hand when learning and gaining knowledge on the other patients and ultimately relaying this information to the readers without giving himself away to the rest of his group. Chief Bromden is also an ideal author because all throughout the book, there are hallucinations and visions weaved through the text, which I believed Kesey chose because it keeps the reader not only entertained and interested, but also giving them an understanding of what the patients are going through and how their lives are on a daily basis. It shows just how the ward is affecting them on a psychological level. If Kesey had chosen any other character to narrate the story, it would not be near as clear on a personal level with the other patients because they do not have the perk of being thought of as deaf. Although Chief Bromden may not be seen as a constantly reliable narrator, he definitely is the best choice. He is almost omniscient. Kesey’s choice of words is especially enhanced when he described new people or the horrific hallucinations that Chief Bromden go through. I have seen a high amount of descriptive and dark works when Kesey decides to have the thick and murky fog rolling in to the men as a way to pacify them and scare them all at the same time.
Ripperda 7
"Her face is still calm, as though she had a cast made and painted to just the look she wants. Confident, patient, and unruffled. No more little jerk, just that terrible cold face, a calm smile stamped out of red plastic; a clean, smooth, forehead, not a line in it to show weakness or worry..." (113)
In this excerpt it is obvious that Kesey's crowning achievement is his fantastic word choice and imagery. The description given to us of Nurse Ratched's face. Intricate words, such as unruffled, cold, smooth and stamped, are used in a way that portrays her face as perfectly as Kesey intended it too. Her face is so stone cold calm that it is like it is simply a mold stamped into plastic. Her face is so unchanging that it is as if it is painted on. This is a change from earlier, no longer is the nurse reacting so strongly at the notion of these ideas presented by the doctor and McMurphy, but simply she is just staring blankly. Kesey is obviously trying to show that not only is she so angry that a facial expression can not even lend a partial summary to it, but he is also showing that the nurse is not stupid. She knows that this is likely a ploy by McMurphy to get under her skin. If she lets him get under her skin then she loses power. The imagery is not only perfect for this situation, but it also is a bit humorous in that it is comparing the nurse to plastic. She is a motionless, lifeless plastic toy. This whole paragraph is written very smoothly by Kesey, who blends the words together with exceptional punctuation and word choice to create a very compelling and entertaining paragraph. In my opinion this paragraph is a good representation of Kesey’s fantastic use of imagery and word choice that is used through out the entire novel.
“And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself” (131).
Kesey is a magnificent author. His use of creative writing techniques, piercing imagery, humor, and distinct horror allows a reader to be enthralled by his writing. I chose an excerpt from page 131 in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that I feel portrays many of these writing qualities that Kesey possesses. His use of Chief Bromden, the narrator, gives the reader an insight like no other narrator is capable. Because of the belief throughout the ward that Chief Bromden is deaf, Kesey is able to write of many observations that the reader may not otherwise have been told. This is unique characteristic of the book and one that I find particularly helpful. Also, through Chief Bromden and his PTSD from the war, horror is prevalent among the pages of the story. This trait not only disturbing at some instances, and undoubtedly horrific for Chief Bromden who believes these instances to be real, but also creates slight humor for the reader who knows that the machinery and fog is nothing but a figment of imagination. Although, because these events seem so surreal to the Chief (narrator) the imagery Kesey illustrates is at times confusing, but very clear at the same time. The imagination is interesting to visualize and therefore is another reason Kesey is able to make this reading such a great catch.
“There’s long spells--three days, years--when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog. When I can see, the guys are usually moving around as unconcerned as though they didn’t notice so much as a mist in the air. I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn’t affect mine.” (117).
Most novels that I am forced to read for classes can drag on and become uninteresting, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is attention-grabbing and enjoyable. Kesey seems to really bring the story to life. The way he narrates as Bromden, for me, makes me feel almost a part of the story. Bromden’s hallucinations are uber creative and amazing. Kesey’s creativity in the way he entangles symbolism within everything else going on keeps the reader interested and eager to interpret the meanings. Also, his word choice is very clever. The names that Kesey picks for each character are so creative yet blatantly obvious (Is he mocking the idea of looking too far into literary criticism?).
Kesey varies the chapter length in the novel which helps to create and shift moods. On page 114 starts a new chapter about the men playing a game of monopoly. The mood is playful, cheery, and a little sarcastic. This chapter lasts two pages; two pages of a completely contrasting mood to the following chapter. The next chapter starts grave and serious. The viewpoint is changed also. Bromden is in a state in which he sees the fog.
Kesey does a great job of combining humor and horror. McMurphy is a humorous character that serves as a comic relief to the otherwise solemn asylum. His foil, Nurse Ratched, is cold and robotic. Some of the hallucinations are obscene and horrific, but then once the viewpoint is back to “reality” the mood has changed. Kesey includes sarcasm and humorous bickering throughout the novel.
Ken Kesey has proven to me that he is one of the most fantastic writers in history; his use of vividly disturbing and uniquely beautiful imagery is indescribably great.
Ellis, a Chronic patient in the book is repeatedly restrained to a wall in a crucifixion position. He is ordered to:
“... go to your place on the wall, hands up, to receive the nails..”
Ellis goes and robotically puts his hands up to the wall, without thought, in order to be restrained. He has become a mental vegetable: each time he is crucified on the wall a steady stream of urine flows down his leg--showing the reader he has lost all control; this makes him one of the books most sympathetic characters. These frequent allusions to Biblical and Christ images give the novel and its characters a martyred, spiritual, and existential vibe. Kesey meshes these religious notions with grotesquely evil situations to highlight the control, power, and authority establishments (like religion) can hold over the masses.
Reality is a system of commonly assumed and agreed upon notions. Chief Bromden is an unreliable narrator to people like us, the readers, who generally share a common perception of reality. Just because we don’t (or refuse to) see the things that Bromden describes as a result of his paranoid schizophrenia, doesn’t make his reality any less real that the one that we all assume other “normal” people adhere to. Bromden’s hallucinations provide a glimpse into his “distorted” reality and give the reader an extremely poignant depiction of the events that occur in the ward--more so than anyone who adheres to my reality would ever be able to articulate.
The black boys who work for Ratched have become mere parts on her methodically evil robotic machine of order and stability. When Santa Claus makes a stop by the ward, the black boys take him in and are able to convert him into a man that is just as disturbed as the other tenants. They can take Jolly Ol’ Saint Nick and turn him into a depressing, innocence-lacking ward patient; another one of The Big Nurse’s peasants. Although the idea of Santa coming into an asylum is humorous, Kesey weaves it with the horror of conformity making it doubly moving, attention grabbing.
Kesey uses an eclectic variety of characters throughout this novel, so word choice and placement had to be key in the story’s development. In the case of Billy Bibbit, a stuttering, bumbling patient, Kesey writes his words in a choppy, disjointed fashion so that the reader is always able to indicate that Bibbit is speaking despite the lack of direct clarification. Here Bibbit is describing the various character’s roles in the ward, specifically Chief Bromden:
“Everyone calls him Chief Buh-Broom, though, because the nurses have him sweeping a l-large part of the time. There’s not m-much else he can do, I guess.”
Here you can see that although it is not specifically indicated that Billy Bibbit is speaking, the stuttering, bumbling man is indeed.
“I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to really have happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen” (80).
I am obsessed with Kesey’s writing techniques, and his brilliant intuition. Not only does he put things out of place for character emphasis, but he also tries to put his words together so that the reader is fully understanding of every single idea, every phrase. Every thought that Chief Bromden tells the readers, has a reason, a purpose, either foreshadowing or something of the like. Everything is meticulous and well-planned. He has a fantastic way of allowing the readers to remember characters through the clever names placed with their “problems”, and this should be very appreciated with the pace of the book itself. Even the title is keen: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; even the title portrays a pun, which shows the full orchestration of Kesey’s works, especially with the idea of birds zooming throughout the story itself. Kesey does an immense amount of trying to “dull” the horrific concepts (such as rape) with his own little euphemisms (like the thermometer, and the door closing to the shower room). He also is less afraid to tell the reader more than they should probably need to read, which is entrancing, because of his well-placed verbiage and sometimes non-realistic details, such as wires and dust coming out of the body with the guts. Another way he adds horror to the book is through his surreal monstrosities of death of other patients, and through the terrors the patients have to strain through regularly. The readers are shown how the patients react to even the littlest of things, whether it be through humor, or fear. Throughout his character’s narration, Kesey shows real talent through his transitions, particularly in Chief Bromden’s switch from listening, to thinking, to dreaming, and back again. Sometimes he will remember something, and that takes him out of the real world, away from everything that frightens him, and sometimes he quickly snaps back to life, other times, he keeps rolling with the fog, which, ironically, is just what allows him to be in his own world. Kesey is talented with his ways of switching gears through plot and through reactions. I love the use of humor to back off the intensity within the book. Kesey knows just how to keep readers entertained.
“There’s a shipment of frozen parts come in downstairs--hearts and kidneys and brains and the like. I can hear them rumble into cold storage down the coal chute. A guy sitting in the room someplace I can’t see is talking about a guy up on Disturbed killing himself. Old Rawler. Cut both nuts off and bled to death, sitting right on the can in the latrine, half a dozen people in there with him didn’t know it till he fell off to the floor, dead. What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait” (129).
Kesey starts off this excerpt by saying that a shipment of frozen parts has come in. At first your mind might jump to some sort of animal, but then you know better. It is shocking to hear humans, especially those who have passed, discussed in such a brutal manner. Kesey then gives a name in a two word sentence. It is used very effectively since we have previously heard about Rawler. He was sent to Disturbed after Ratched became sick of dealing with his wailing non-stop. Directly after such a short sentence, Kesey writes what happened to Rawler in a long, rather sprawling, quip. It is easy to see a man in the basement chatting with another about how Rawler bit the bullet. You do not imagine the men being sad or angry about the patient’s death but rather finding it hilarious. Kesey uses such word choice as “sitting right on the can” and “didn’t know it till he fell off” to make it sound funny. The story of Rawler’s death seems like a joke you would tell somebody at a party. You want to laugh but then you realize that they are talking about a man who killed himself by personally castrating himself. To end the excerpt is Chief Bromden’s last line, about impatience. He is saying that he does not understand why people kill themselves when death is coming for them all the same, all they have to do is wait for it. It is deep and poignant and it helps you to understand Bromden even more than you already did. There is also the ironic cruelty that proves that Nurse Ratched is indeed a ball-cutter. She was so sick and tired of Rawler ‘the bawler’ that she got rid of him and sent him to Disturbed. This ward is full of people that have no escape from the asylum and will be there forever. Rawler felt like he had no other way out than to kill himself. Perhaps he thought that it was an ironic way to die, or that he did not deserve his ‘cahones’ since he never stood up to Ratched, or perhaps he was just plain crazy. Either way, his death was certainly meaningful and symbolic to the book and was not written by Kesey on accident.
In these two closely related excerpts, the reader can clearly see Kesey’s sheer genius as an author. Chief Bromden is dreaming/hallucinating about the “dungeon,” or “machine” below the patients’ dormitory. Although it is not real, the hallucination provides insight of the institution, and seems to be a premonition of Blastic’s death. The narrative technique Kesey employs--switching from hallucination to reality--gives a setup for a shock to the reader. At first, the reader is in disbelief about what Bromden is seeing; the situation and created image seem surreal. Although what Bromden sees is, in fact, not real, a disturbing and eerie effect is created for the reader when Blastic is later found to be dead in his bed and being carried out on a stretcher. Also, it is interesting that Kesey chooses to make a show out of the dead patient in Bromden’s dream, but one can see it serves a true purpose. Although the Public Relations comes off as funny, it is also quite twisted how he is bringing pupils through to witness a dead Chronic hanging upside down, gutted. Kesey’s purpose here seems to be to demonstrate how appalling mental institutions used to be. I also believe that the shock of the gasping student is Kesey’s way of showing that people were ignorant of the conditions experienced by the patients of mental institutions. When they finally witnessed what went on, they were intrigued (the student leaned in to look), yet disgusted. While the dead Chronic creates horror for the reader, the occurrence is laced with some humor: the Public Relation's giggling and drinking. Additionally, Kesey’s use of “stargazes,” “gasps,” and “limp” adds to the not-so-amusing, grotesque fantasy of the hallucination. The word “stargazes” makes the situation sound more mystical/unreal, “gasps” makes the student sound unsettled, and “limp” makes the body, and the situation as a whole, seem more unpleasant.
“Harding gathers the dice up with his long fingers, feeling the smooth surfaces with his thumb as if he was blind. The fingers are the same color as the dice and look like they were carved by his other hand. The dice rattle in his hand as he shakes it. They tumble to a stop in front of McMurphy” (116).
Ken Kesey definitely has a queer style of writing (whether that be from the acid or not). I like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but I don’t think I will be reading anymore of his books. In the paragraph, he describes Harding’s hand in such a creepy way. Kesey uses words that I would never think of or use. With Chief Bromden as the narrator, Kesey chose a somewhat reliable narrator. I get confused when Chief Bromden goes into one of his hallucinations because I don’t know what’s what. It is in some of these hallucinations that Kesey describes some of the most jolting image and horrific images. A man getting cut open in a slaughterhouse. That was probably an image I didn’t want to imagine. Sometimes when I’m reading, I just start sniggering because the things McMurphy does to the Nurse are horrible but amusing. I would love to just sit at one of their group meetings and watch McMurphy and the Nurse go at it. The statements McMurphy makes about the Nurse and the group are hilarious. Another amazing part was the Acutes first act of defiance. McMurphy finally has them realize its the World Series but they can also go against Nurse Ratched’s rules. The Nurse just goes ballistic when she see’s them all sitting down and watching a blank television screen. Kesey shows an absolute hatred between the Nurse and McMurphy. I hope this intense hatred grows even more throughout the book.
“‘Why then, I’ll just explain it to you.’ McMurphy raises his voice; though he doesn’t look at the other Acutes listening behind him, it’s them he’s talking to. ‘The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin’ at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more gets spotted in the fracas, then it’s their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin’ party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it--with chickens--is to clip blinders on then. So’s they can’t see’” (57).
Kesey is a magnificent writer who knows how to attract a reader’s attention by using a fascinating narrator and including unexpected surprises. Because Chief Bromden, who has schizophrenia and pretends to be deaf and dumb, narrates the book, the story is told from a different point of view. Bromden can see and hear everything around him, and no one knows he is listening. Throughout the book Bromden describes his hallucinations and everything he sees around him. Although Bromden is an excellent narrator, he can also be very unreliable; because of his schizophrenia, you are not sure if he is describing what is actually going on or what he just sees. Kesey’s word choice throughout the entire novel is phenomenal. He describes all the characters with elaborate detail, and he makes the reader see clear pictures in his/her head. Kesey could have just described how the patients act during meetings, but instead he compared them to chickens. Comparing the patients to chickens, makes the passage more entertaining, and it makes it easier to understand how the patients act. Also, while reading this passage I could picture in my head a group of chickens with the faces of each patient, ripping each other to shreds, moving from one chicken to another.
The way Kesey formats the book is different than any other book I have read. One example is none of the chapters are the same length; some are thirty pages long and some are one paragraph. This different length in chapters keeps the reader interested. At first I did not like this inconsistency, but I have grown to appreciate the variation. Also, each chapter includes flashbacks and hallucinations that make the book more interesting.
Throughout this entire book Kesey does a great job of combining humor and horror. The passage above is an excellent example of Kesey using humor because McMurphy is comparing the patients to chickens. However, the passage also shows horror because chickens are ripping each other to death, with blood pouring out. Kesey also adds humor through the character McMurphy. McMurphy likes to play tricks on Nurse Ratched, and he has no filter. Overall, Kesey does a great job of keeping the reader’s attention and keeping the reader entertained.
Ashley Guthmiller pd. 6
I personally believe that Ken Kesey is a very good writer. Kesey uses Chief Bromden’s situation to show the depth of humanity in a way that not many authors use. It is obvious that Ken Kesey is very aware and specific about his word choice. For example, whenever he is talking about the Big Nurse it is not rare to see a word that has to do with machinery like “drilling into my skull” when he is talking about her glares. Ken Kesey also does a good job of creating a visual that give you a negative feeling with his word choice. "I been in some meetings where the table legs strained and contorted and the chairs knotted and the walls gritted against one another till you could of wrung sweat out the room. I been in meetings where they kept talking about a patient so long that the patient materialized in the flesh, nude on the coffee table in front of them, vulnerable to any fiendish notion they took: they'd have him smeared around in an awful mess before they were finished" (151). Kesey uses words like "strained," "contorted," knotted," and "gritted" to give you a negative feeling and visual about the room and the meetings that are held in there. Kesey also creates a cool narrative technique whenever the fog overtakes Chief Bromden at the beginning of the meeting. Chief describes himself letting the fog cover him and he only catches what people are saying every so often until McMurphy begins to speak and pull him out of the fog. I like the technique where he italicized the few sentences that Chief caught to show that he could hear them but he was not listening, instead he was letting the fog welcome him. An example of Kesey combining humor and horror is when Nurse explains that she can keep McMurphy as long as she wants for no greater reason than to break him. This is ironically humorous because McMurphy just got out of a work farm because or arduous labor that he did not want to do, but at least he was relatively his own man and he would get out of that eventually. The only way he could get out of there was by pleading insanity and now he has it worse off because he is in there with no foreseeable end date and he is not a free man in any sense. This is also terrifying because because Nurse has the power to keep him in their and do whatever she wants to him with little to no reasonable evidence that he needs to be kept.
“The worker takes the scalpel and slices up the front of old Blastic with a clean swing and the old man stops thrashing around. I expect to be sick, but there’s no blood or innards falling out like i was looking to see--just a shower of rust and ashes, and now and again a piece of wire or glass. Worker’s standing there to his knees in what looks like clinkers"(88).
I personally believe this segment in the book, a single paragraph, can explain why Kesey is a fantastic writer. Not only can he explain what happens in the hallucination that the Chief is having, but he narrates it in such a way that leaves the audience or reader feel somewhat shocked and disgusted by what could have been much more gruesome. Using the phrase “...a shower of rust and ashes,...” could have been made much more gruesome by changing it to something more human. But, for me especially, that outpouring of nonhuman carnage carried within Plastic body is almost more off putting. Another phrase is when Kesey/Chief Bromden mentions that it only took “...a clean swing…” to end Blastic’s suffering in the vision. Obviously this is not the first death the Bromden has seen, and it makes me feel empathy for him. I also feel that Kesey used these words that are a bit less forward, such as slice, sick, and shower, to both make it easier for the reader to digest that Blastic had just been cut open as well as make Blastic seem less human. On Kesey’s part, this was a very experimental technique. I see that now, making a character seem less human. Those characters, however, are usually evil or bad in some way. Blastic, on the other hand, seemed innocent of many things. His being cut open was sort of shocking, and the manner in which the man did it was machine like, as though he did not care about the preservation of a human body. Realizing that this was a vision of Chief Bromden, I know that the Black Boys and the Doctors were much more careful with Blastic’s body that they were in the vision. Though in the passage I have chosen to read most indepth, I feel that a blend of humor and horror is very important to being a great author. Kesey, I believe, is one of the best I have read in a long while concerning this subject. Sure, there are books that are meant to be all horror or all humor. The drama in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, though, is almost always closely followed by a spot of humor. After the event of Blastic’s death, the reader is quickly thrown into a new spot of McMurphy’s hijinks. After one of the most gruesome parts of the book, the very next plot premise is McMurphy and his whale underwear. Being tossed back and forth between drama and humor can be refreshing or stressful, depending on the personality of the reader. In books like Lord of the Flies, the steady incline to drama can be just the same as being thrown straight into the drama. I, while reading both, had the same feelings during the high points of drama. However, Kesey is much more experimental when it comes to drama, while Golding stay to a tried and true formula.
“And suddenly nobody’s hooting at him anymore. His arms commence to swell, and the veins squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can't lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift. But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it. Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.” (pg. 125)
I believe that Kesey is an exceptional writer. Kesey is brave to use a mentally ill character as the narrator; this is not something most authors would attempt. By doing this Kesey has given the reader a point of view that is hard to relate to, forcing the reader to think about what they are reading because of an unreliable narrator. It causes us to ask ourselves what the definition of crazy really is. Within the excerpt I have chosen, Kesey uses the word “scraping” to describe McMurphy’s breath. Usually when I think of the word scraping, I think of being injured. This tells you that McMurphy is having trouble keeping his breathing steady. I like that he uses the word scraping because it forces the reader to imagine the pain that McMurphy is feeling. Another word that stood out to me was “heaving”. The word heaving is used to describe lifting something. Although McMurphy is lifting something in this excerpt, Kesey uses it in order to describe his neck instead of the act of lifting the console. The jolting image that Kesey is trying to show in this excerpt is that McMurphy is capable of shaking the cement. He not only shakes the cement, but the other patients out of their slumber. They begin to realize that they can make a change even though it may seem impossible. The thought of someone trying to lift a huge console is comical in itself. The situation seems funny, but Kesey effectively changes the humor into horror when he mentions the blood on the levers of the console. Kesey does this mood change several times in the novel, probably due to the narrator’s schizophrenia which would cause someone to have abnormal emotional responses.
I accidentally posted without my excerpts. Here is my new post with the excerpts.
“He thinks of something funny and has to stop his lecture long enough for a swig from the flask to stop the giggling. During the pause one of his pupils stargazes around and sees the gutted Chronic dangling by his heel. She gasps and jumps back. The Public Relation turns and catches sight of the corpse and rushes to take one of those limp hands and give it a spin. The student shrinks forward for a cautious look, face in a trance” (p.89).
“This time he doesn’t untie the sheet but walks away from me to help two aides I never saw before and a young doctor lift old Blastic onto the stretcher and carry him out, covered with a sheet--handle him more careful than anybody ever handled him before in all his life” (p.90).
In these two closely related excerpts, the reader can clearly see Kesey’s sheer genius as an author. Chief Bromden is dreaming/hallucinating about the “dungeon,” or “machine” below the patients’ dormitory. Although it is not real, the hallucination provides insight of the institution, and seems to be a premonition of Blastic’s death. The narrative technique Kesey employs--switching from hallucination to reality--gives a setup for a shock to the reader. At first, the reader is in disbelief about what Bromden is seeing; the situation and created image seem surreal. Although what Bromden sees is, in fact, not real, a disturbing and eerie effect is created for the reader when Blastic is later found to be dead in his bed and being carried out on a stretcher. Also, it is interesting that Kesey chooses to make a show out of the dead patient in Bromden’s dream, but one can see it serves a true purpose. Although the Public Relations comes off as funny, it is also quite twisted how he is bringing pupils through to witness a dead Chronic hanging upside down, gutted. Kesey’s purpose here seems to be to demonstrate how appalling mental institutions used to be. I also believe that the shock of the gasping student is Kesey’s way of showing that people were ignorant of the conditions experienced by the patients of mental institutions. When they finally witnessed what went on, they were intrigued (the student leaned in to look), yet disgusted. While the dead Chronic creates horror for the reader, the occurrence is laced with some humor: the Public Relation's giggling and drinking. Additionally, Kesey’s use of “stargazes,” “gasps,” and “limp” adds to the not-so-amusing, grotesque fantasy of the hallucination. The word “stargazes” makes the situation sound more mystical/unreal, “gasps” makes the student sound unsettled, and “limp” makes the body, and the situation as a whole, seem more unpleasant.
“Then they crossed the moon--a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose” (165).
Kesey is undoubtedly an excellent writer. Every sentence is different from one another, with differing flows that help to add to the situation. In this book, Kesey also utilizes large scale, macro-sized, changes in chapter length that certainly break up the book into both manageable and thought provoking chunks. The machinery imagery is interesting. Kesey is just a man, though, and an unorthodox one at that. I do not find it to be filled with a blend of humor and horror (unless this blend is a little light on the humor) as I could not find any attempt at breaking up the tragedy of the insane. The unreliability of the narrator, Bromden, could scare away many potential readers (perhaps this was Kesey’s goal all along?). A novel like Jane Eyre has the potential to be easily read and enjoyed by almost anyone, as it possesses both understandable writing and an interesting story. Jane Eyre is also a very influential book, and its negligible difficulty does not negate that influence. Perhaps what I am saying is, Kesey certainly succeeded in writing a groundbreaking novel focusing on the insane. He also does it in a well written way. Sentence structure cannot cover the unreliability of the narrator for the majority of the people. If you have a work of art that could inspire millions, but it was displayed with a burlap sack over it, it would be hard to make out the beauty of the brushstrokes.
“While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water—laughing at the girl, the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”(249-250)
Native Americans are always depicted as being silent and able to have a sense with nature that no other race has. Kesey makes Bromden like Lenny from Of Mice and Men, he is a large individual that does not exert his physical abilities until he lifts a control panel through a window to gain freedom from both the ward and his mental prison. Bromden hears everything, he acts deaf and dumb, travels around the hospital with his broom(which gives him the nickname “Chief Broom”.) Kesey causes the reader to have some questions about his reliability due to his mental hallucinations most likely caused by a rumored 200 electroshock therapies. These slips could be seen as completely irrelevant to the story and do not symbolize anything…but Kesey does not throw in random signs for no reason. The hallucinations represent the deep and inner symbolic functions of the hospital. The gutting of Old Bastic symbolizes how the hospital(combine) takes inmates and remove the innards(human emotions) and replace them instead with machinery that forces the patients to become conformers. Kesey throws in vivid word choice, he keeps the reader focused on the story by including “peculiar” events in the story. Such as when Sefelt has a seizure, Kesey describes Ratched pulling the gel-like body of Sefelt back together. Kesey brings important points to the reader by repeating certain words such as “machinery” “fog” and etc. I’m tired…just like Pete. Kesey makes connections with the reader by creating characters that you can easily connect with. Most people have had a sense of being tired and a feeling of laziness towards trying to communicate with society(such as students.) Kesey also includes characters that cannot be connected with, if you met someone who has had the pleasure of castrating themselves upon a toilet that may contain a note containing gibberish and fresh blood, it’s most likely someone who can connect with Old Rawler or Baptist.
“It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, have to crawl around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs till I find my gobs of gum stuck there. Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at” (128).
Kesey is an amazing writing, there is no doubt about that. I will be honest; I was not looking forward to read this book because of the length and short periods of time between the due dates, as I am a slow reader, but Kesey has caught my attention and has held it. He has made me literally laugh out loud at times and made me yell in horror at the sequence of events at other times. He really grasps the use of his narrator and puts to use the power Chief Bromden has of acting deaf and obtaining all information throughout the ward without anyone knowing. Kesey has a very large vocabulary and he puts to use a lot of words that are simple but not used that often in our day to day language so they bring a very descriptive image in your head. An example of that would be the word gob, as in “gobs of gum”; it allows you to just imagine the disgusting underside of Chief Bromden’s bed. Also, in the same sentence, he uses the word springs and how Chief Bromden can feel them all and makes a very clear image of the crappy little bed he sleeps on every night. Kesey likes to follow long, eventful chapters with short insightful, symbolic chapters. I enjoy the short chapters more because those chapters are what link the theories I have to reality. They always seem to clear up any questions I have; they are also more interesting to read because they generally have nothing to do with the chapter before it but it is a little story of what happens in the ward, typically at night. Kesey blends humor and horror flawlessly. On page 201, when McMurphy shatters the glass on Ms. Ratched he made it very humorous the pieces of glass falling on top of her and McMurphy’s carefree attitude towards the situation, but also kept the horror of the rest of the ward and how Ms. Ratched reacted.
”His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift” (125).
I think this portion of the novel is one of Kesey’s greatest description excerpts. This is the point in the novel when McMurphy is trying to lift the control panel off of the ground to prove something to the patients. The patients have lost faith in McMurphy and their united cause against Nurse Ratched. While performing this act Kesey takes extra pains to describe how much McMurphy is straining to lift this object that cannot be lifted by one man. It talks about the muscles flaring and veins popping in great detail to go to great pains about the odds against McMurphy. Kesey even goes as far to italicize certain words to show how farfetched McMurphy’s idea of lifting this object is. He emphasizes that McMurphy knows he can’t lift it and everbody knows that McMurphy can’t lift it. Why does McMurphy try to lift the object then? The men in the story have been complaining profusely and McMurphy is trying to prove a point to the men. He is trying to show them that if you don’t like how something is in this world, the least you are obligated to do is try to change it.
Kesey uses this portion of the novel to create a small climax. It is a shift from the usual, boring day at the ward. McMurphy trying to lift the control panel is a shift and a small boost in energy in the story. It is one of the first times that McMurphy tries to teach the men that there is more to life than just sitting around in the ward and rotting your life away. It is both a humorous and a horrible point in the story. Kesey takes this second to explain every detail of McMurphy’s brute strength with pinpoint precision. It is a horrible sight to imagine this monster of a man being pushed to his breaking point. The amount of pure muscle that is being tapped into to prove this point of McMurphy’s is absolutely incredible. However, at the same time it is humorous because McMurphy is trying to lift a control panel for a broken shower. It is something that he knows and everybody knows can’t be lifted, yet, he tries to lift it anyway.
“He was talking to the lifeguard, and I was standing a few feet away. Mcmurphy must have been standing in a hole because he was having to tread water where I was standing on the edge of the pool; he had a whistle and a T-shirt with his ward number on it. He and McMurphy had got to talking about the difference between hospital and jail, and McMurphy was saying how much better the hospital was. the lifeguard wasn’t so sure, I heard him tell McMurphy that, for one thing, being committed ain’t like being sentenced. “You’re sentenced in a jail and you got a date ahead of you when you know you’re gonna be turned loose,” he said (170).
Ken Kesey does an excellent job with showing how big Chief Bromden is by the pool depth. McMurphy is having to tread water while Bromden is watching him. This shows Bromden to be menacing to readers if only he used it to his advantage instead of hiding in fog. Next Kesey talks about the lifeguard, “...he had a whistle and a T-shirt with his ward number on it.” The T-shirt the lifeguard wears shows, even though he is entrusted to watch out for the lives of others, he is still owned by the staff and hospital. Earlier in Kesey’s book, Nurse Ratched and McMurphy have an argument over TV watching and it ended in him winning over her dictatorship. The Nurse could have sent him to a different floor where she was not in charge, but she kept him. She keeps him because she knows he will be calmed when he goes to the pool to meet the lifeguard. “He went on getting a kick out of it till about Wednesday of the next week. Then he learned why the Big Nurse was so sure of her hand,” (168). The Big Nurse knows that McMurphy does not do well in confinement and needs freedom. The bit of humor that Kesey includes in this passage was Bromden realising how much bigger he is. The horror is McMurphy beginning to understand the Big Nurse’s plan against him. This character of Kesey’s is made to sound so large, but subtly, there are hints to show he is not as big as the reader takes away from the book. I am excited to read on in this interesting yet thrilling novel!
“It’s getting hard to locate my bed at night, have to crawl around on my hands and knees feeling underneath the springs till I find my gobs of gum stuck there. Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.” (128)
The placement Kesey chose for this excerpt is very odd seeing as it is it’s own chapter, but it is very powerful. It breaks up the thoughts of Bromden from the chapter before and following. Kesey’s word choice throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest may suggest he is unintelligent, but it proves otherwise. Bromden is not a very well educated man and to really become the character, his word choice helps to pull together the concept of who Bromden really is. In this paragraph alone, the first sentence feels very choppy and incomplete but it leaves us with the impression of how Bromden feels while in the fog. Kesey does a phenomenal job with blending humor and horror together. The thoughts and feelings going through Bromden’s head while being in the fog is hard to read at times. I often find myself feeling sorry for Bromden and finding myself becoming more emotionally attached to the characters in this book. Kesey inflicts emotion from the beginning of the book to where we are now. I also find it very ironic that Bromden can not really understand why McMurphy is dragging them out of the fog. If anything it gives the readers a little hope that eventually he will be pulled out of the fog. Overall, Kesey is an extraordinary writer and I can not wait to finish this book.
Ken Kesey is a terrific writer. Terrific sounds very similar to terror, in which this book is filled with. His techniques are excellent. Kesey has a special ability to be able to write from a completely different race or mind set. I believe Chief Bromden is the one who wrote the book even though he is only the narrator. Chief is like a camera in a reality television show. He allows us to see and hear everything he is seeing happen with limited thoughts from Chief Bromden. Kesey’s choice of names for characters is another thing to talk about. Most characters have a name that associates something with that character’s actions or ways. The dialogue between the characters show each character has his or hers own expressions and tone. I read words, but I feel I can hear the patients. Kesey’s use of such ideas make the characters even more special. It helps me remember and wrap my head around how each character is. McMurphy is always speaking in a demanding and loud tone. Billy is always stuttering. Chief Bromden is always using a broom, cleaning and sweeping. We learned Chief has a gigantic structure but a small mind set. Kesey developed Chief to be a kid in a huge shell. Kid meaning he is bosses around and told what to do all of the time. He is actually very intelligent and knows probably the most out of all the people in the ward. While it seems McMurphy generates the most humor, Chief has his fair share of puns and jokes. “If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year-old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons” (145). Chief may not have intentionally made this joke because he probably does believe the guys are not crazy but the readers shuckle after reading that. They are crazy! Chief’s dreams bring horror into this work too. The dreams are gruesome and filled with horror.
“She listens a minute more to make sure she isn’t hearing things; then she goes to puffing up. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger, as big and tough-looking’s I seen her get over a patient since Taber was here. She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path! I’m scared to think what she’ll do.” (96)
1) Although many may criticize Kesey’s writing as improper and broken, I feel that this style adds to the development of the character. Kesey chooses certain words and verbs to demonstrate the narrator’s intelligence. Chief Bromden often does not use proper subject-verb agreement, lacks subjects in many of his sentences, and overall has a lot of grammatical mistakes. Examples of these grammatical mistakes are evident in this passage when Bromden uses “tough-looking’s,” and “roll down anything in her path!”
2) Another way Kesey proves his literary excellence is through the use of jolting images and shifts in narration. In this passage, Kesey successfully creates remarkable imagery by explaining step-by-step how Nurse Ratched becomes a “truck.” These hallucinations happen often to the narrator throughout the book. I feel that Kesey’s inclusion of these images show his literary skill because essentially, each hallucination is like a metaphor. Authors often have trouble constructing good metaphors. Kesey’s ability to craft so many of Chief Bromden’s visions immensely demonstrates his skill as a writer.
3) Throughout the book, Kesey has to use the perfect blend of horror and humor to keep the readers satisfied. His intention is to shock the readers enough to leave a mark, but keep enough humor in order to not be grotesque. This aspect is demonstrated in the above passage. It is comical that such a small woman would become a large vehicle due to being unable to control her anger. It almost makes you laugh as you see how much she is overreacting. However, this passage is horrifying at the same time. It is awful to imagine that the narrator sees such disturbing images as real events in his life. Chief Bromden’s horror is evident as he slowly backs into the wall, away from the monster that is Nurse Ratched.
Kesey is actually a great writer though his novel is more on the bizarre side. His word choice is great and placement is great. For instance on he writes, “‘ Loo loo loo all the time till I thought I’d go nuts. What they should do with that whole bunch of dingbats up there is toss a couple of grenades in the dorm. They’re no use to anybody--’” (120). This was said by Scanlon, and Kesey had excellent diction in choosing to write about throwing grenades in the rooms. He could have just said kill them, but he made it a lot more violent and interesting. Another writing technique he uses that really makes his writing exceptional compared to mediocre is his way of adding choppy chapters like when he writes, “Whatever it was went haywire in the mechanism, they’ve just about got it fixed again. The clean, calculated arcade movement is coming back: six-thirty out of bed, seven into the mess hall, eight the puzzles come out for the Chronics and the cards for the Acutes... in the Nurses’ Station I can see the white hands of the Big Nurse float over the controls” (181). This section was one whole chapter making it really emphasize what was happening. Kesey also uses great word choice like arcade movement which helps depict how the atmosphere is changing back to normal in the Nurses control. Kesey also shows great humor and irony making him an excellent writer when he writes, “‘Keep in mind that this man performed violent acts for the sole purpose of getting away from the work farm and into the comparative luxury of this hospital.’... And the third boy mutters, ‘Of course, the very nature of this plan could indicate that he is simply a shrewd con man, and not mentally ill at all.’... He sees how he’s stepped way out of bounds and tries to bring it on as a joke by giggling and adding, ‘You know, like ‘He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum’’” (154). Kesey does a great job at making us believe that they have found out who McMurphy really is, but then he makes it a big joke which is ironic. This irony causes good old fashion humor that I for one never have found in a book. He is a great writer I believe mostly for the fact that his writing is so humorous. No book before now has been able to laugh physically, and Kesey achieved this. Some of humor is so vulgar that it is funny making you think it is socially unacceptable to laugh even though it is funny. All of his writing does a great job of making the reader think and feel through the eyes of Bromden.
First of all Ken Kesey is a fantastic writer. I know this because of the purposeful placement of his word choice.
"Now, Hank, don't you see that was just a kindly precaution to keep from startilin' you folks with the truth? The doc wouldn't lie like that about just any patients, but we ain't ordinary nuts; we're every bloody one of us hot off the criminal-insane ward, on our way to San Quentin where they have better facilities to handle us. You see that freckled-faced kid there? Now he might look like he's right off a Saturday Evening Post cover, but he's a insane knife artist that killed three men."(236)
This paragraph shows all the qualities of dark humor, word choice and jilting action. The reason it is dark is because they could have ended up that way. Billy could have felt that murder was his only escape from his mother, that is overpowering and controlling. Knife word needs a controlled precision. That could have been his outlet. Instead he has a stutter and lives in an asylum. Kesey gave each man a criminal activity that they could have gone with instead of going to Nurse Ratchet. Kesey was masterful in bringing out the stereotype of "insane" people of that time. He had Mcmurphy use the fear of insanity to get what he wanted and used it to his advantage. He used societies norms against them. They humorous aspect was the reader knew they weren't killers by now we view them as somewhat normal in their own quirky way. It helps that they are in the asylum by their own will and not forced like Mcmurphy. That makes them safe to us.
The word choice is with how Mcmurphy talks. He sounds not all that educated, unlike Harding who is written in perfect grammar when he is speaking. The use of "Ain't" which is not a word shows this. They way he emphasizes his words shows how exaggerated he makes it seem. He could say that they are insane but Kesey uses criminally-insane to jolt the reader and make them think about what is really going on. He uses references of the time that we don't know about but would make those readers of the 1960's think about everyday life and do we really know ourselves. Also before hand the gas clerk asks them if they are from the asylum, not the insane asylum. This connotes back to what the word means:saftey. They men were safe from the world there. Kesey placed that word there without any adjective because he wanted to emphasize how the men felt leaving their safety net.
Kesey jolts the reader by going and saying we are a bunch of crazies that will kill you if you do not give us what we want. The rest of the men were shy and did not want conflict. They were passive riders of life. That is why they lived in the asylum. Kesey jolts us in many ways with the subtle chapters that are not the same length, or the hallucinations and dreams Bromden has, but I think this was the most abrubt for me because he came out and said they were all crazy. He was saying Mcmurphy is crazy....even if it is just a lie. We do not know Mcmurphy's past. He could have killed someone in a back alley fight.
Huizenga 7
Kesey is a terrific writer in my opinion, because his transitions between the “real” world and delusion are effortless. For example Kesey writes:
“There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks. I can see mole burrows humping along under the grass and buffalo weed” (126).
What Bromden is describing here is himself entering the picture and how he has simply walked right in and is losing touch with the “real” world. Kesey very subtly states this by having Bromden say that he can not hear the visiting doctor over the sound of the water on the rocks. This is also a delicate blend of humor and horror, it is humorous purely because this situation is considered to be absurd by most people, and the horror comes from the fact that Bromden is slowly losing touch with sanity. Kesey also makes effective use of of imagery. By having Bromden describe this beautiful scene, it completely catches the reader off guard, because of the sharp contrast between the harsh, regulated ward and this soft, free nature scene. Kesey also uses specific words carefully. In this particular excerpt, in order to maintain the harsh “real” world connection, he says that the visiting doctor is “stabbing;” using such a strong, forceful word breaks the reader from the setting and showing them for sure that it is only a delusion. With the word choice, he also uses very detailed imagery, even more so than is used in most other descriptions thus far. Using excess imagery, helps the reader to understand that this delusion is just as “real” to Bromden as the ward is “real” to the other patients. It shows that he truly believes what he sees. This shift in storytelling shows that his delusions are becoming more and more vivid and less discernible from “real” life. He places these delusional episodes periodically throughout the novel to show the progression of his craziness. At the same time, these delusional episodes usually follow some out of the ordinary event such as McMurphy’s arrival, or in this case the visit from the visiting doctor. All in all, Kesey uses so many literary techniques and blends them so beautifully that this novel, which should be disjointed because of the narrator’s almost stream of conscious memories coupled with his delusional episodes, has a seamless flow that makes the novel nearly impossible to put down and stop reading.
“They laugh and then I hear them mumbling behind me, heads close together. Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets. They don’t bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. Everybody thinks so. I’m cagey enough to fool them that much. If my being half Indian ever helped me in any way in this dirty life, it helped me being cagey, helped me all these years” (1).
I believe Kesey is a fantastic writer. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is filled with Kesey’s wonderful narrative techniques. In his book, Kesey allows the reader to see through the lens of a mental patient. This excerpt located at the beginning of the book gives us a picture of the hospital and the hospital workers. I find this an interesting way for Kesey to start off the book but the deeper I read into the book, I completely understand his placement. Kesey makes it clear to us that this isn’t just any normal hospital. He uses the blend of humor: “..because they think I’m deaf and dumb” and horror: “humming hate and death and other hospital secrets” that makes us question Kesey and his sanity. In this excerpt, we get introduced to the narrator, Chief Bromden. Kesey sets up Chief Bromden perfectly for the rest of the book. We find out right away that chief Bromden isn’t exactly “sane.” Kesey does a great job using word choice describing the black nurses as machinery. It gives us jolting images of the hospital workers and their characters. Kesey throws in some humor in this excerpt when Chief Bromden talks about himself “being cagey.” Between word choice, shifts in narrative technique, and the blend of humor and horror, Kesey is a fascinating writer with a fascinating narrator all throughout the book.
“I slid from between the sheets and walked barefoot across the cold tile between the beds. I felt the tile with my feet and wondered how many times, how many thousands times, had I run a mop over this same tile floor and never felt it at all”(152). I believe that Kesey is a terrific writer with a fascinating narrator. He has the ability to capture your attention bringing in what Chief Bromden sees, some of which is an allusion, or at least real to Chief Bromden. Kesey's decision when it comes to word choice and placement, in my eyes, is extremely well done. It may not be completely proper, but it fits the book and the narrator. When it comes to Chief Bromden, who hasn’t had a outloud conversation with anyone in years, to narrate it is only expected that he does not know all the correct ways of speaking. I like how Kesey shifts narratives. He brings in different chapter lengths giving a sense of what was important. Also how he can bring the scenes to life, particularly the scene when Chief Bromden was at the window. It showed how everything was so much clear now and almost new to him. Through the entire book Kesey has proven to combine humor and horror in ways that complemented both. The way Kesey uses Bromden's allusions to show the more cruel and sometimes humorous side of things. Kesey also uses McMurphy extremely well to show the humorous side of thing. Kesey uses the fog to almost engulf the entire mindset of the ward and make it feel distant and robotic in a sense. Kesey was able to bring the ward back to life when McMurphy lifted the fog during the group session bring to light everything Bromden was unable to see. Bromden was able to come out of the horror of nothingness and come back into the world bring his weird hallucinogens with him. The allusions was extremely well used to bring the horror side to life. When Kesey had Chief Bromden see a slaughter houses with Old Blastic showing him being murdered.
Danny Eitreim
Period 2
“It’s rolling in thicker than I ever seen it before. I can hear them out there, trying to go on with the meeting, talking some nonsense about Billy Bibbit’s stutter and how it came about. The words come to me like through water, it’s so thick. In fact it’s so much like water it floats me right up out of my chair and I don’t know which end is up for a while” (133).
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an excellent book that really allows Ken Kesey’s fantastic writing to shine. Writing from the point of view of a schizophrenic but passive giant is not an easy task, but Kesey pulls it off quite well. Everything from his word choice to sentence structure functions to paint a powerful picture of the “Chronic” known as Chief Broom. Kesey deliberately uses colloquial vocabulary and improper phrases like “should of” to subtly inform the reader that Bromden is not an intellectual like Harding, but a common man like McMurphy. Long, flowing, dream-like paragraphs also give an insight into Bromden’s disturbed mind. Kesey does an excellent job of showing what is going on in Bromden’s head--whether it be vivid hallucinations of the “Combine” or a detailed observation of his surroundings. These hallucinations can often come as a surprise to the reader because Kesey so seamlessly transitions them with Bromden’s more rational thoughts. Frequently in the novel, Bromden will be observing his surroundings before being sucked into memories of his past, and especially his father. In another example, he looks at a picture and is immediately transported into the scene physically--in his mind. Kesey’s experience with LSD certainly aided him in describing these lucid episodes.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a unique blend of the humorous and the horrific. The “hero” of the novel, Randle Patrick McMurphy, is an unruly scoundrel--but a likable one. His antics on the ward to upset Nurse Ratched are often fairly amusing, but the reader is quickly brought back down to earth and reminded of the dismal state that most of the patients live in. I think that Ken Kesey does this to put us in the state of mind of the patients. They are given a slight reprieve from their dreadful life in the ward by McMurphy and his boisterous deeds, but are never able to truly escape the confines of the hospital, both mentally and physically.
“We could look out the transport’s round, scratched windows and watch the jeeps draw out till it rolled across the field and stuck against the windows like wet cotton” (130).
Kesey has created outstanding word choice and placement throughout his nobel peace prize winning book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He stimulates his reader’s by the placements of his words. Similes, metaphors, symbols, themes, and many other literary devices are used within the book to enhance Ken Kesey’s word choice. For example, in the quote on page 130, he uses a simile not only to show creative word choice, but also to set imagery.
Kesey makes it easy for the reader to imagine what is going on in the book by having Chief Bromden as the Narrator. We can vividly see every hallucination and event that happens in the asylum. Because Kesey has such great word choice, it sets the images in our minds so clearly. It was smart of him to have Chief Bromden as the narrator, so the readers have to critically think by figuring out if Bromden is having a hallucination or if it is an actual event occurring in the book. Realistically, we do not know if anything in the book is a hallucination or not, for the most part we can figure out if it is or not, but Kesey is sneaking.
As a reader, I am infatuated by the way Kesey can mix humor and horror in his book. On page 130, he puts horror into the quote by saying the “scratched windows”. As readers, the reason behind the scratched windows is unclear, but we can assume they were madly scratched by an inmate in the asylum. Humor is placed in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by us knowing Chief Bromden is hallucinating; they are funny to us as readers because we know that the crazy fantasies he is telling us are just inventions his mind created and not the truth. Kesey is an extremely intelligent writer.
Kesey is a peculiar writer. Reading this book is an interesting task. Chief Bromden uses bad grammar and “Indian” structure. McMurphy has a sense of humor with a temper. Kesey leaves out words to get the feel for the book along with putting important information first in sentences. I had to pick two parts that I enjoyed. The first one is McMurphy speaking. “‘But I tried, though.’ he says. ‘Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?’” (125). This was said when McMurphy tried to break through the wire trying to grab a controller. I think this has some foreshadowing with it because he points out that he tried. He almost wants the boys to know that even though he failed, he gave it his best shot. He took a risk. Kesey uses the word choices here that are harsh and almost piercing. When I read this part I thought, he is serious. McMurphy wanted this statement to stick with the guys around him. The language also shows McMurphy as a person and you see that with each character as well. The next part that I found was, “What makes people so impatient is what I can’t figure; all the guy had to do was wait” (129). In the middle of Chief Bromden’s confusion he says this. He almost does understand life on a deeper level but how can he expect people to be patient with a process that is meant to break the people. In all the humor Kesey will put a serious part to almost bring the readers back to reality. Or the other way around. Kesey will lighten up the mood with a humours part. This book was written well and thought through for sure. I enjoy Kesey’s work and it makes reading the book more interesting. He paints pictures as if you are there standing next to Chief Bromden. The smoke seems so real and standing with broom listening. It is as if you can hear the voices and not do anything.
Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.
He opens his eyes and looks around at us. One by one he looks at the guys — even at me — then he fishes in his pockets for all the IOUs he won the last few days at poker. He bends over the table and tries to sort them, but his hands are froze into red claws, and he can’t work the fingers.
Finally he throws the whole bundle on the floor — probably forty or fifty dollars’ worth from each man — and turns to walk out of the tub room. He stops at the door and looks back at everybody standing around.
'But I tried, though,' he says. 'Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn’t I?'
And walks out and leaves those stained pieces of paper on the floor for whoever wants to sort through them” (123-125).
Kesey demonstrates remarkable authorship throughout the book. This section struck me so clearly because it utilized Henry James’ technique from his narrative The Turn of the Screw. At the start of the passage, Kesey leaves the reader mystified at McMurphy’s tactics. What possible reason could McMurphy have to bet on lifting the panel? Stated multiple times through the book, McMurphy is obviously physically incapable of lifting the panel. Yet, he claims--even betting money on his success--that he can lift the gargantuan hunk of machinery. By the end, Kesey enlightens the readers utilizing McMurphy’s comment: 'But I tried though...Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, didn’t I?' Without outright informing the reader as to McMurphy’s allusion, Kesey makes it as clear to the reader as it is to the men on the ward that McMurphy is scolding them for their passive admission to the Big Nurse’s authority on the World Series game. McMurphy’s goal was hopeless--utterly unattainable. Yet he tried his utmost, leaving his blood on the levers of the control panel. Even though the fight against the Big Nurse may seem pointless, as though nothing can come to fruition from the friction, that doesn’t mean the altercation isn’t worth fighting. Kesey chooses to duplicate his word choice. When McMurphy first starts to lift the panel, Cheswick is his only supporter, and a tentative one-- 'By golly, he might do it.' By the end of the chapter, they are all thinking 'by golly, he might do it.' The building support for McMurphy’s cause of lifting the panel, even the belief that he may succeed, shows the mounting support for his true cause of watching the World Series, and his even truer cause of overthrowing Nurse Ratched’s authority. Kesey also jumps around as he narrates, first giving Bromden’s perspective, then backing up to see the range among all the men. The blend of humor and horror is accomplished with McMurphy’s carefree, joking attitude. He gives humorous one-liners throughout the scene, making the men and the reader laugh, before dropping into seriousness with his real effort. Dropped precisely in the heads of the men in the ward, the reader is shocked and awestruck as the second layer of McMurphy’s seemingly ridiculous manner dawns. Kesey artfully puts the reader in an uncomfortable place--the heads of insane men--to give the stomach clenching guilt and astonishment of the 'birds.'
Hillestad Pd. 7
“There was times last week when I’d hear that full throttled laugh, watch him scratching his belly and stretching and yawning and leaning back to wink at whoever he was joking with, everything coming to him just as natural as drawing breath, and I’d quite worrying about the Big Nurse and the Combine behind her. I’d think was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way she was hoping he would. I’d think, maybe he truly is something extraordinary. He’s what he is, that’s it. The Combine hasn't got to him in all these years; what makes the nurse think she gonna be able to do it in a few weeks? He’s not gonna let them twist him and manufacture him.” (161)
Ken Kesey did a fantastic job writing his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The narrator of the story, Chief Bromden, pretends to a deaf man in an insane asylum and is arguably perfect for the job of narrator. Perfect because Kesey writes that everyone believes he is deaf so he in turn, gets information that other patients aren't allowed to hear. Imperfect because he is in an asylum and Bromden’s story might not be trustworthy.
Kesey includes an assortment of different word choices. The names of the characters, the simple grammar “mistakes” he makes, even the words he chooses to capitalize all have a specific purpose in this book and are meant to catch the eye of the reader.
The jolting images that seem to stand out most are the Santa seen and the dream Bromden has about the vegetable’s death. They are both very strange but Kesey grabs the readers attention and make them want to read more. The shifts that seem to stand out most is when Chief is describing what is happening to the character around him and then when he is instead, talking about himself. It is a cool way to write the novel because it makes it seem that there are multiple stories happening at once.
Kesey’s blend of humor and horror happens in different ways in the story. On page 154, Nurse Ratched calls a meeting about McMurphy. The point is brought up that McMurphy could potentially lose his cool and take his anger out on a staff member. McMurphy is compared to Napoleon and Attila the Hun. The fact that the nurses and aids are genuinely concerned for their safety is humorous because at this point in the story, McMurphy seems to be simply a free spirited, fun loving, slightly wild character.
Ken Kesey does a wonderful job of writing; however, does an even better job of choosing his narrator, Chief Bromden. One of the passages that sticks out to me the most is when Bromden is describing McMurphy’s hands before he shakes them. He says
“I remember real clear the way that hand looked: there was carbon under the fingernails where he’d worked once in a garage; there was an anchor tattooed back from the knuckles; there was a dirty Band-Aid on the middle knuckle, peeling up at the edge. All the rest of the knuckles were covered with scars and cuts, old and new. I remember the palm was smooth and hard as bone from hefting the wooden handles of axes and hoes, not the hand you’d think could deal cards. The palm was callused, and the calluses were cracked, and dirt was worked in the cracks. A road map of his travels up and down the West. That palm made a scoffing sound against my hand. I remember the fingers were thick and strong closing over mine, and my hand commenced to feel peculiar and went to swelling up out there on my stick of an arm, like he was transmitting his own blood into it. It rang with blood and power. It blowed up near as big as his, I remember..”
Kesey’s use of words in this paragraph is immaculate. It provides the reader with a great image in their head of McMurphy’s hand. Two weeks ago, when we had the LOTF blog task, I wrote about a passage that I thought did a good job of describing the island. I think that Kesey does an even better job of describing something as simple as a hand while not being too verbose in the process.
Although the image of the hand itself is good, the foreshadowing and background that this provides may be better. It talks about him looking as though he had traveled across the country doing hard work. It says his hands are callused and dirty implying that he had previously worked on a farm. Kesey also foreshadows by saying the hand was not one you’d think could deal cards. We all know that McMurphy is there for the gambling.
Seldom do I even remotely like stories I have read in English classes, for the overwhelming majority simply do not hold my interest for terribly long, if at all. Cuckoo’s Nest, however, is one of my favorites (right after A Tale of Two Cities). I rather love this book. Not because of the story nor the plot, exactly, but because of the book itself. Because Kesey’s writing is absolutely marvelous. It is entertaining and captivating and terrifying and sobering all at once. The stories Kesey creates for each of his characters are written so bluntly, yet with the force of a sharp blow made by careful words. Few writers compose with such compelling imagery, and fewer do so with techniques such as length experimentation and narrator experimentation (as far as reliability and the qualities of story narrators--Kesey’s narrator Chief Bromden is not the typical narrator, being the paranoid schizophrenic he is); however, Kesey meets those points easily.
One of my favorite passages from the book is in the very beginning of the novel--it is a part that immediately captured my attention.
“I creep along the wall quiet as dust in my canvas shoes, but they got special sensitive equipment detects my fear and they look up, all three at once, eyes glittering out of the black faces like the hard glitter of radio tubes out of the back of an old radio” (3).
The way that it’s written, the rhythm that beats along the words in this sentence left an impression on me. The word choice, the imagery, the metaphor. What draws me to it most is the metaphor, really, how it introduces the idea of society being a Combine, how Bromden’s hallucinations morph the world around him into a machine, the people around him into robots, strewn with copper wires and nuts and bolts.
It makes a statement that society generates people into a standard so-called cookie-cutter shape, piecing them together on assembly lines and spitting them out one after another into the rigid world of the Combine, where there is no room for anything remotely different; it challenges the conformist ways of society. Kesey amplifies this point by carrying the mechanics metaphor all throughout the novel, mentioning it here and there, now and again, in little bits or long passages that match with Bromden’s crawling out of or receding into the fog of his schizophrenic mind.
“At home she locks herself in the bathroom out of sight, strips down, and rubs that crucifix all over that stain running from the corner of her mouth in a thin line down across her shoulders and breasts. She rubs and rubs and hails Mary to beat thunder, but the stain stays. She looks in the mirror, sees it’s darker’n ever. Finally takes a wire brush used to take paint off boats and scrubs the stain away, puts a nightgown on over the raw, oozing hide, and crawls in bed.” (165-166)
I think that Kesey is a great writer, he knows how to use imagery to manipulate the reader's mind, but also to make the reader to think of what exactly he is reading. It is a perfect book for school because it is a story within a story, but one has to actually look and read for the second one. Kesey uses great word choice by using a biblical reference, he uses a crucifix as an example that no matter how hard the Nurse tries to wipe away her sins, she is still overly evil and there is nothing that she can do to fix it. Also she hails to Mary which is a way of repenting sins and it does not work for her no matter how hard she tries. I believe that Kesey does this to give the reader a strong opinion of how evil the Nurse actually is. I believe that Kesey uses Bromden as that the narrator because everyone thinks he is deaf and dumb. Bromden uses this to listen to the conversations and it also makes him super observant. He also has some form of Schizophrenia which makes him see things differently than the other patients. Kesey knew that having a narrator with Schizophrenia meant that he could use more imagery to further detail each character which leads to even more thinking for the reader to do. Although Kesey did not use much humor in this excerpt he did use a lot of horror. This is the first time we truly learn the extent to the Nurse’s evilness, even though we all have a very large hunch that she is purely wicked. She is oozing evil and no matter how hard she tries to hide it is just keeps oozing, in fact the harder she tries to hide how evil she, the darker the stain gets.
(1) For word choice and placement I picked a paragraph from page 126. “There’s a path running down through the aspen, and I push my broom down the path a ways and sit down on a rock and look back out through the frame at that visiting doctor talking with the residents. I can see him stabbing some point in the palm of his hand with his finger, but I can’t hear what he says because of the crash of the cold, frothy stream coming down out of the rocks. I can smell the snow in the wind where it blows down off the peaks...” (126). I really like how Kesey almost seems to twist the world around. As a reader it creates an almost dream like atmosphere through Bromden’s eyes. I liked how one moment Kesey puts us in the hospital with the doctor and the next paragraph we are in the photo with Bromden, looking out at the day room and doctor.
(2) For jolting images and shifts in narrative technique I picked a section from page 165. “Then they crossed the moon—a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more…. When he couldn’t hear them anymore either, he commence to lope off in the direction they had gone, toward the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment…. I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement” (165). These three paragraphs are one of my favorites in the entire book. Kesey fills them with so much possible symbolism and uses the narration of Bromden to make it feel like you are with him, watching the events. It has such a mysterious and solemn feel to it and the imagery is so powerful.
(3) Throughout the entire book Kesey throws us for both humor and horror without either one overpowering the other. Shortly after the seriousness of the meeting on page 156 Kesey switches to the incidents with cleaning the toilet bowls, a scene that is, in my opinion, a very humorous one. He does this throughout most of the book, giving us just enough humor that the book doesn’t become overly depressing and sad. At the same time, he throws in enough horror that the book could never be considered a comedy.
“The way the Big Nurse acted so confident in that staff meeting, that worried me for a while, but it didn’t make any difference to McMurphy. All weekend, and the next week, he was just as hard on her and her black boys as he ever was, and the patients were loving it. He’d won his bet; he’d got the nurse’s goat the way he said he would, and had collected on it, but that didn’t stop him from going right ahead and acting like he always head, hollering up and down the hall, laughing at the black boys, frustrating the whole staff, even going so far as to step up to the Big Nurse in the hall one time and ask her, if she didn’t mind tellin’, just what was the actual inch-by-inch measurement on them great big ol’ breasts that she did her best to conceal but never could. She walked right on past, ignoring him just like she chose to ignore the way nature had tagged her with those outsized badges of femininity, just like she was about him, and sex, and everything else that’s week and of the flesh.”
Kesey is a genius with this unusual twist in writing styles. His writing style may come from how he used drugs that messed with his mind, the hippie lifestyle that he lived, or the fact that he lived in a mental institution for awhile. Somehow, Kesey manages to use the mental instability of patients in a mental hospital to tell this beautiful story that keeps the reader on their toes, confused, and intrigued all at the same time. He makes you think about if what is going on in the book is real or if it is all just a figment of the narrator’s imagination since the narrator is a schizophrenic mess. In the paragraph above, Kesey captured McMurphy’s rambunctious actions, while showing Nurse Ratched’s power and control.
“The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants by just turning one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen windows goes through rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night—throb off and on furiously with day and dark, and everybody is driven like mad to keep up with that passing fake time”
Kesey did an amazing job with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I have never once read a book with a more interesting narrator than Chief Bromden. Chief Bromden is one of a kind. Kesey created an unreliable narrator by making Chief Bromden a paranoid schizophrenic. As a reader, you have to read between the lines and really analyze every sentence to truly figure out what’s going on. This leaves room for different readers to interpret things differently, which I think is an amazing thing. You see what it’s like to be inside an insane mind.
I find the excerpt above especially interesting. The excerpt shows how Chief Bromden assumes that the Big Nurse is almost controlling time. In Chief Bromden's mind time is relative and changeable. Kesey does a great job describing how there is rapid changes of light to show morning, noon, and night. Another thing I noticed about Kesey’s writing is his sentence structure. Kesey writes very long descriptive sentences. He packs his sentences full of semicolons, dashes and apostrophes. The excerpt above also shows how much control Chief Bromden feels that the Big Nurse has. He thinks that she changes the clock and he sees how this basically keeps everyone on her schedule and not their own. It shows how Bromden views himself as “little” and how he views the Nurse as “Big”. As a reader of Cuckoo’s Nest you come across countless examples where Bromden’s reality may actually not be reality at all. This leads to deeper meanings and critical analysis of this book. This is book is truly a one of a kind book that should be continually studied and analyzed throughout the ages.
Tristin Pliska 6
“Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets” (1).
Kesey has a talent for using unique diction. His word choice for his characters fit each of them well. He also does a good job of creating characters that all talk in their own unique ways, creating many opportunities for different experiments to be performed on the word placement. In this novel Kesey provides many examples of jolting images or shifts in narrative techniques. An example of one of these jolting images is Billy Bibbit’s suicide by castration. Throughout the book Kesey goes through many narrative shifts, a prominent one throughout the book is the narrator’s drifting into the “fog”. It shifts from a viewpoint that seems understandable and reliable to one that represents a mentally ill person drifting into their own little world. Another example of a shift in narrative technique is from going to an author who does not speak for most of the novel, to one that starts to become vocal. In addition another way that Kesey performs a shift in narrative technique, is changing from telling what is going on in the present, to recalling a memory in a completely different setting. Kesey has a crazy balance of humor and horror. The general idea of being in a mental institution that forces you to take medication which puts the subject into a sort of mental “fog” sounds horrifying. However throughout the book it is filled with humor, often found from McMurphy’s rash but quick witted personality. The book also contains a lot of sexual humor through innuendos and references. On the other side, there are some more horrific ideas such as two suicides, brain dead people due to experimentation, and sense of hopelessness. In conclusion, all of these ideas combine to make Kesey the terrific writer he is.
Tristin Pliska 6
“Hum of black machinery, humming hate and death and other hospital secrets” (1).
Kesey has a talent for using unique diction. His word choice for his characters fit each of them well. He also does a good job of creating characters that all talk in their own unique ways, creating many opportunities for different experiments to be performed on the word placement. In this novel Kesey provides many examples of jolting images or shifts in narrative techniques. An example of one of these jolting images is Billy Bibbit’s suicide by castration. Throughout the book Kesey goes through many narrative shifts, a prominent one throughout the book is the narrator’s drifting into the “fog”. It shifts from a viewpoint that seems understandable and reliable to one that represents a mentally ill person drifting into their own little world. Another example of a shift in narrative technique is from going to an author who does not speak for most of the novel, to one that starts to become vocal. In addition another way that Kesey performs a shift in narrative technique, is changing from telling what is going on in the present, to recalling a memory in a completely different setting. Kesey has a crazy balance of humor and horror. The general idea of being in a mental institution that forces you to take medication which puts the subject into a sort of mental “fog” sounds horrifying. However throughout the book it is filled with humor, often found from McMurphy’s rash but quick witted personality. The book also contains a lot of sexual humor through innuendos and references. On the other side, there are some more horrific ideas such as two suicides, brain dead people due to experimentation, and sense of hopelessness. In conclusion, all of these ideas combine to make Kesey the terrific writer he is.
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