One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey, 1962
A huge, laughing drifter talks his way onto a locked psychiatric ward and shows the men there what defiance costs — and what it's worth.
Ken Kesey
Kesey wrote it after night shifts at a veterans' hospital in Menlo Park, California, and volunteered for government-funded LSD experiments at Stanford before he was published.
Feels like defiance, power and madness.
The kind of laughter that doesn't pretend the pain isn't there.
While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water — laughing at the girl, at the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier... 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. He knows there’s a painful side; he knows my thumb smarts and his girlfriend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain. Books by Ken Kesey
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