Gay character in one flew over the cuckoo& 39
A Great American Novel.
Whom the gods would destroy…
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Chief Bromden has been on the mental ward for years, one of the Chronics who are never expected to recover. Everyone believes he is deaf and dumb, but his silence is a choice – a result of years of feeling that no one heard him when he spoke. His supposed deafness makes him invisible to the staff, which means that he can listen in to conversations patients aren’t meant to hear. He knows that Nurse Ratched, in charge of the ward, is part of the Combine – the all-powerful authorities who control men through psychiatry, medication and technology. Chief Bromden may be insane – or perhaps he’s too sane. As he puts it himself…
…you believe this is too horrible to hold really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still challenging for me to have a explain mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.
Into the ward one day comes a new patient, Randle P McMurphy: loud, brash, rough, funny. Maybe he’s insane, or maybe he’s faking it to get away from the serve farm he was in for “fighting and fucking too much”. McMurphy is soon the “bull goose loony”
The Methods of Madness: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Awakenings
The Methods of Madness: Representations of Inmates, Authorities and the Asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Awakenings
Tina Butler, mongabay.com
May 6, 2005
- This paper focuses on the concepts and representations of the institution and the inmate, and how films, even when presenting in a seemingly understanding tone, have often served only to further stigmatize both entities.
- “Madness desire not be all breakdown-it may be also breakthrough.” – R. D. Laing
Perception of the mentally ill, the environments in which they are housed and those who nurture for them has been largely determined and influenced by filmic representation. In American cinema, advocacy of the asylum in film has been a recurrent theme. There were 34 feature length US productions featuring scenes of psychiatric hospitalization between 1935 and 1990 alone (Levers). The institution has traditionally been vilified in these representations, both in the space itself, as well as the inhabitants-the inmates and employees. The asylum, by its detachment from mainstream society is a place that has bee
Jackton Gay, who more recently found herself directing mostly modern plays with smaller casts, has found she has her work slash out for her, directing “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and its cast of 17 actors – her own madhouse to run, so to speak. This additional test is, however, one she finds to be something of a benefit.
“I really do jump at opportunities [to work with massive casts]. It’s a other beast altogether to negotiate the space and all those bodies. It’s definitely more challenging, but I feel like for an audience member, it’s more powerful because you construct an entire world for them by having that many people on the stage.”
When you think of Ken Kesey’s classic “Cuckoo’s Nest,” family fun probably isn’t the first thing that comes to consciousness. However, the People’s Brightness and Theatre production of the asylum-centered piece promises to have plenty to say to both the young and the old.
Gay described what she sees as universally appealing about the piece in terms that we all understand: individuality.
“‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ is not a classic in the tradition
Book Specs
Author: Ken Kesey
Publisher: Viking Compass
Publishing Date: 1962
Number of Pages: 311 pages
Genre: American Literature, Psychological Fiction
Synopsis
The setting for these defeated lives is a mental institution. The teller of the story, a half-Indian and a long-time inmate, has made the most finish retreat from life of all of them; he will not talk, and he has fooled the staff into thinking he is deaf and dumb. But through his self-imposed protective fog he is an acute observer. His vision of the existence around him seems to have a truth which is beyond the definitions of sanity or insanity. To him the society is run by an all-powerful “Combine.” The heart of the war, the “Big Nurse,” is the chief instrument of wicked. She wields her insidious power over the men to destroy their wills and freeze them into mindless obedience.
Into this gray world comes McMurphy, a brawling, gambling man, entire of spirit and a glorious lust for animation. He is horrified by the docility with which the other men agree the rule of the Big Nurse and decides to fight her on her own terms. The battle begins, for him, as a lark – a way of winning the bet
"The Outsider as Insider: Masculinity and (Re)Americanization in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
“The Outsider as )nsider: Masculinity and Re Americanization in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" Jonathan Mitchell As a guarantor of a specific vision of US identity, the myth of Americanization is bound historically and culturally, as well as psychologically, within a racist, homophobic and gendered matrix. Focusing predominately on the last two, the following discussion will be concerned with this matrix as it was re-visited in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) in response to a perceived (gender) malaise in mid-twentieth century America. The novel will be located within its contemporary framework as a book by a white, heteronormative dude, written during a period of perceived crisis in white, heterosexist masculinity, and legitimating a specific paradigm of US masculinity. The novel utilizes the myth of Americanization to (re)Americanize the men on the ward; to bring them from the margins to the mainstream. Thus, while the novel has been generally received as a celebration of individual vigor and freedom, this cultural persuasion