Flashbacks In One Flew Into The Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey was born in 1935 in La Junta, Colorado and was raised in Springfield, Oregon. He wrote, “One Flew into the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1962, an in-depth look into the environment of a psychiatric ward. In the 1960’s Kesey was a paid volunteer as a mental subject for the U.S. Army. During this time, he wrote about his experiences with mind-altering drugs. Kesey also worked in a psychiatric ward as a hospital attendee. He wrote about the abuses in the system, which served as a backdrop for his novel One Flew into the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey tended to write under the influence of acid especially at the time he wrote the novel. He was also part of a group, “The Merry Pranksters” who spent time on the open road and were supporters of open drug use. EXTEND
2. T he novel is structured as a chronological story of events that take place in the mental hospital. Kesey wrote it as a stream of consciousness style, which could be due to represent the main character or simply the way Kesey expresses himself through his writing. He uses flashbacks to when Bromden was a child to give a short background on the characters and make it seem more personal. The characters talk as if they have been

The novel is not filled with as much irony as it is other literary devices. The type of irony used is mainly hyperboles, oxymoron, and euphemisms. The hyperboles are most used as Kesey talks about all the serious things that happen in an extreme way. There are a few oxymoron, one of which being, “Clean out of control” (5). That oxymoron helps define the novel, one of structure and chaos, sanity and insanity. For euphemisms, there are not very many but the main one is being “fixed” in many ways that are a lot harsher than fixed. Kesey begins this with, “ Took him away to be fixed” (16). Where he is not just being “ fixed” most likely he was receiving a lobotomy, Kesey could be omitting using this as a euphemism or Bromden could just not know what it is exactly they