compendious : Ken Kesey ’ s novel depicts a mental mental hospital in which repeated attempts to diagnose the patients as harebrained are conceived as separate of a larger dodge to produce ductile, docile subjects across the United States. A key text for the antipsychiatry drift of the 1960s, it addresses the kinship between sanity and rabies, conformity and rebellion. The novel remains finely balanced throughout. It is never clear, for exemplar, whether the alleged “ Combine ” is, in actuality, a boundless authority designed to ensure social control across the whole population, or a protrusion of the narrator Chief Bromden ’ mho paranoid resource. besides, the interview of whether insanity, to quote R. D. Laing, “ might very well be a department of state of health in a huffy world, ” or at least an appropriate shape of social rebellion, is raised but never quite answer .
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Into the aseptic, hermetically sealed world of the refuge wanders Randall P. McMurphy, a contemporary “ cowboy ” with a “ sideshow swagger ” who disrupts the ward ’ s smooth running and challenges the cheeseparing entire authority of the steely Nurse Ratched. Insofar as McMurphy ’ randomness acts of rebellion assume by and large self-interested forms, the fresh ’ second efforts at political mobilization fall shortstop, and there remains something anxious about its racial and gender politics. It takes the “ cowboy ” McMurphy to save the “ indian ” Bromden and, in the earned run average of civil rights and feminist movement, the white male patients are painted as “ victims of a matriarchy, ” competently supported by a conspiracy of black orderlies. In the end, Kesey ’ s impressive attempts to come to grips with the amorphous nature of modern power—a baron not inevitably tied to leaders or even institutions—make this a prescient, foreboding work. If McMurphy ’ mho destiny is what awaits those who push besides hard against the arrangement, then Bromden ’ s sanity depends on not turning a blind eye to injustice and exploitation.
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