Kenneth Elton “Ken” Kesey September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001, was an American author, best known for his novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He considered himself to be the link between the Beat Generation of the 1950’s and the hippies of the 1960’s. Some of his works include “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)”, “Genesis West: Volume Five (1963)”, “Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)”, “Kesey’s Garage Sale (1973)”, “Demon Box (1986)”, “Caverns (1989)”, “The Further Inquiry (1990)”, “Sailor Song (1992)”, “Last Go Around (1994 written with Ken Babbs)”, “Twister (1994)” and “Kesey’s Jail Journal (2003)”.
Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is set in a Oregon asylum; written in 1959, it was the product of Kesey’s time working in the graveyard shift as an orderly in a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California. Kesey at that time was also taking psychoactive drugs (Peyote and LSD) as a part of Project MKULTRA. During his night shift at the hospital Kesey spoke to the patients and witnessed the working of the institute, he started to feel that the patients were not really crazy but were just more individualized than society was willing to accept. Parts of the novel were written while he was under the influence of the drugs and hence might have influenced his writing. The setting of the novel takes place in the 1950’s when many of the nation’s younger generation began to challenge conformity. Nurse ratchet represented the power and control of the government and the patients represent the people being manipulated by the nurse.
The title “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” comes from or rather refers to the shock therapy induced recollection of the Chief’s childhood playing with his grandmother. The Chief remembe...
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... MeMurphy’s intelligence and cunning is lowered.
In the end both the movie and the book are very interesting and among many other things also hint towards physical and moral courage, group effort, morality, challenging the symbols of conformity, human freedom vs. control, power of laughter; all of which were the general norms of the society when Kesey wrote his masterpiece.
Works Cited
Ken Kesey. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” New York: The New American Library, 1962.
Lone Star College System. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Lone Stat College Systems. 30 July 2011
The Internet Movie Database. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).” IMDb. 30 July 2011
Wikipedia. “Ken Kesey.” Wikipedia July 2011. 30 July 2011
The author Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and went to Stanford University. He volunteered to be used for an experiment in the hospital because he would get paid. In the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, Kesey brings up the past memories to show how Bromden is trying to be more confident by using those thoughts to make him be himself. He uses Bromden’s hallucinations, Nurse Ratched’s authority, and symbolism to reveal how he’s weak, but he builds up more courage after each memory.
Kesey, Ken. One flew over the cuckoo's nest, a novel. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Print.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Toronto, Ontario Canada: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1962.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest takes place in a mental institution in the Pacific Northwest. The narrator of the novel is Chief Bromden, also known as Chief Broom, a catatonic half-Indian man whom everybody thinks is deaf and dumb. He often suffers from hallucinations in which he feels that the room is filled with fog. The institution is dominated by Nurse Ratched (Big Nurse), a cold, precise woman with calculated gestures and a calm, mechanical manner. When the story begins, a new patient, Randall Patrick McMurphy, arrives at the ward. He is a self-professed 'gambling fool' who has just come from a work farm at Pendleton. He introduces himself to the other men on the ward, including Dale Harding, the president of the patient's council, and Billy Bibbit, a thirty-year old man who stutters and appears very young. Nurse Ratched immediately pegs McMurphy as a manipulator.
Ken Kesey presents his masterpiece, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, with popular culture symbolism of the 1960s. This strategy helps paint a vivid picture in the reader's mind. Music and cartoons of the times are often referred to in the novel. These help to exaggerate the characters and the state of the mental institution.
When norms of society are unfair and seem set in stone, rebellion is bound to occur, ultimately bringing about change in the community. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest demonstrates the conflict of individuals who have to survive in an environment where they are pressured to cooperate. The hospital's atmosphere suppresses the patients' individuality through authority figures that mold the patients into their visions of perfection. The ward staff's ability to overpower the patients' free will is not questioned until a man named Randal McMurphy is committed to the mental institute. He rebels against what he perceives as a rigid, dehumanizing, and uncompassionate environment. His exposure of the flaws in the hospital's perfunctory rituals permits the other patients to form opinions and consequently their personalities surface. The patient's new behavior clashes with the medical personnel's main goal-to turn them into 'perfect' robots, creating havoc on the ward.
27 Jan. 2014. Kesey, Ken. A. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a Novel. New York: Viking, 1962. Print.
Sutherland, Janet R. "A Defense of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's NEst." English Journal 61.1 (1972): 28-31. JSTOR. Web. 31 Oct. 2013. .
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ed. John Clark Pratt. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1996. Print. Viking Critical Library.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a Novel. New York: Viking, 1962. Print.
In Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the author refers to the many struggles people individually face in life. Through the conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy, the novel explores the themes of individuality and rebellion against conformity. With these themes, Kesey makes various points which help us understand which situations of repression can lead an individual to insanity. These points include: the effects of sexual repression, woman as castrators, and the pressures we face from society to conform. Through these points, Kesey encourages the reader to consider that people react differently in the face of repression, and makes the reader realize the value of alternative states of perception, rather than simply writing them off as "crazy."
Ken Kesey in his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest question a lot of things that you think almost everyday. With this famous portrait of a mental institute its rebellious patients and domineering caretakers counter-culture icon Kesey is doing a whole lot more than just spinning a great yarn. He is asking us to stop and consider how what we call "normal" is forced upon each and every one of us. Stepping out of line, going against the grain, swimming upstream whatever your metaphor, there is a steep price to pay for that kind of behavior. The novel tells McMurphys tale, along with the tales of other inmates who suffer under the yoke of the authoritarian Nurse Ratched it is the story of any person who has felt suffocated and confined by our
An exceptionally tall, Native American, Chief Bromden, trapped in the Oregon psychiatric ward, suffers from the psychological condition of paranoid schizophrenia. This fictional character in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest struggles with extreme mental illness, but he also falls victim to the choking grasp of society, which worsens Bromden’s condition. Paranoid schizophrenia is a rare mental illness that leads to heavy delusions and hallucinations among other, less serious, symptoms. Through the love and compassion that Bromden’s inmate, Randle Patrick McMurphy, gives Chief Bromden, he is able to briefly overcome paranoid schizophrenia and escape the dehumanizing psychiatric ward that he is held prisoner in.
Ken Kesey the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest, allows the reader to explore different psychoanalytic issues that plague the characters in his novel. Carl Jung disciple of Sigmund Fraud created “The Collective Unconscious” his theory based on how the mind can be easily overtaken by many outside factors from the past or present and even those that one is born with. The novel takes place in an asylum that is aimed to contain individuals that have mental issues from schizophrenia to repressed memories that are causing insanity. The nurses are seen as tyrants and actually worsens health of the patients turning some from acutes to chronics (incurable), while the patients are limited by their initial conditions or their developing conditions
A. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a Novel. New York: Viking, 1962. Print. The.