In , the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he graduated from Springfield High School in In , while attending college at the University of Oregon in neighboring Eugene, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in , where he was also a brother of Beta Theta Pi.
He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year.
Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. It was this role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at a state veterans' hospital, that inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco.
He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead , black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD.
In , he wrote End of Autumn , about a young man who leaves his working class family after he gets a scholarship to an Ivy League school, also unpublished. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.
Kesey was originally involved in creating the film, but left two weeks into production. Kesey loathed the fact that, unlike the book, the film was not narrated by the Chief Bromden character, and he disagreed with Jack Nicholson being cast as Randle McMurphy he wanted Gene Hackman. Show Details Description:. Item Price. Seller Peter L. Published Condition First Edition. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket with some spine fading and minor wear and tear. Published Condition First Edition of the author's first book.
Although McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift arrives, he and the other patients fall asleep instead without cleaning up the mess and the staff finds the ward in complete disarray. Nurse Ratched finds Billy and the prostitute in each other's arms, partially dressed, and admonishes him. Billy asserts himself for the first time, answering Nurse Ratched without stuttering. Ratched calmly threatens to tell Billy's mother what she has seen. Billy has an emotional breakdown and, once left alone in the doctor's office, commits suicide by cutting his throat.
Nurse Ratched blames McMurphy for the loss of Billy's life. Enraged at what she has done to Billy, McMurphy attacks her and attempts to strangle her to death and tears off her uniform, revealing her breasts to the patients and aides watching.
He has to be dragged away from her and is moved to the Disturbed ward. Nurse Ratched misses a week of work due to her injuries, during which time many of the patients either transfer to other wards or check out of the hospital forever. When she returns, she cannot speak and is thus deprived of her most potent tool to keep the men in line.
Most of the patients leave shortly after this event. Later, after Bromden, Martini, and Scanlon are the only patients who attended the boat trip left on the ward, McMurphy is brought back in. He has received a lobotomy and is now in a vegetative state, silent and motionless. The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow during the night in an act of mercy, before throwing the shower room control panel, the same one McMurphy could not lift earlier, through a window, and escaping the hospital.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written in and published in in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement [3 ] and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America. The s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization , [4 ] [5 ] an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel. The novel is a direct product of Kesey's time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California.
He advocated for drug use as a path to individual freedom, [8 ] an attitude that was reflected in the views of psychological researchers of the time. Each individual's experiences were said to vary; emotions and experiences ranged from transformations into other life forms, religious experiences, and extreme empathy. The novel constantly refers to different authorities that control individuals through subtle and coercive methods.
The novel's narrator, the Chief, combines these authorities in his mind, calling them "The Combine" in reference to the mechanistic way they manipulate and process individuals. The authority of The Combine is most often personified in the character of Nurse Ratched who controls the inhabitants of the novel's mental ward through a combination of rewards and subtle shame.
0コメント