Ken Kesey
I liked this book a lot – it deals with the margins of society, the residents of an insane asylum, and how they fight the woman who is trying to mold them back into normal human beings. “The Combine,” the societies institution to keep everyone in line, is headed by this nurse, and the inmates are none in line with the combine.
Some of the interesting bits:
After the inmates day out fishing:
The way you see the change in a person you’ve been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn’t notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example – a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting it’s electric whistle and moving down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.
Or things like five thousand homes punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory they’re still linked together like sausages, a sign saying “NEST IN THE WEST HOMES – NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS,” a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read “ST. LUKES SCHOOL FOR BOYS” – there were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over. (227-228)
Just absurd, especially told from the standpoint of a displaced, insane indian chief’s son.
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He’d always been so scuffed and bruised that he’d show up out of place wherever he went. He wasn’t able to open up and laugh either. It’s a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass. (228)
Really how lots of the inmates feel, they could live the normal life defined by the combine. But they are too weak, they don’t want to – the asylum life is so much easier. They need someone to dominate them, be it their wife, the big nurse, or Randle Patrick McMurphy.
I really loved “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest,” would recommend it, and I think I’m going to read it again sometime soon.
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