One flew over the cockoos nest

Knowledge of Ken Kesey and his use of psychoactive drugs plays an important role in understanding his delivery of thoughts to his audience. Kesey believed that drugs such as LSD and Mescaline (peyote), which he used as part of governmental experiments, opened up the human conscious to such ideas that couldn’t be expressed or described in a sober state of being. The majority of Kesey’s time was spent under the influence of such drugs while writing his book. Most of his thoughts came from real life experiences during his work on a psychiatric ward in Oregon. Even while he was on drugs, he made his friends give him electro convulsive shock treatments so he could identify with his patient’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

During the years he wrote his first novel, society appeared to be going through many gradua

Throughout past centuries society has viewed females to be inferior to their male counter parts. Kesey takes these attitudes towards women seen in society, and reverses them. Assumptions portraying women as being “ball cutters” and “twitches” (58) are first presented as the novel opens. Ronald Walace, a criticizer of Kelsey’s book, believes “ If men have traditionally oppressed women, now the women oppress the men. In the asylum, the weak, ineffectual men are controlled by, strong domineering women, rendering the sexual roles themselves comic” (Walace 225). An instance of the reversal of female dominance can be seen through the character Billy Babbit. Billy Babbit, thirty-one-years-old, still remains his mothers weak, incompetent son, he is fated to stay an innocent child by his mother's hand. After having intercourse with a prostitute, Babbit gains a new feeling of manhood, only to be crushed by the nurse’s threats to tell his mother about what he has done. He knows how his mother will take the news, forcing him to commit suicide. Terance Martin’s analyzes of characters in the novel are expressed as, “Women in the novel, one comes to see quickly, are powerful forces of control. They represent sinister contemporary versions of feminist tradition in American literature” (Martin 314). This reference makes note that women in the past have typically been acknowledged as fragile characters. But in the novel, men are considered to be weak. Another example of t

Some topics in this essay:
Ronald Walace, Julian Moynahan, LSD Mescaline, Terance Martin’s, Bromden Indian, Nurse Ratchet, Billy Babbit, Harding Harding, Cuckoos Nest, Nurse Ratched, traditional roles, black people, reversal traditional roles, walace 225, characters novel, billy babbit, novel kesey, patients hospital, throughout novel, black people control, reversal traditional, psychiatric ward,