30. American adolescent novel: children and adults in Twain’s “The adventure’s of Huckleberryfinn” and Salinger’s “The catcher in the rye”

 

Summary

Life in St. Petersburg

The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. Two young boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck has been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister, Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him (sic). Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds civilized life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom Sawyer appears briefly, helping Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson's slave, Jim. They meet up with Tom Sawyer's self-proclaimed gang, who plot to carry out adventurous crimes.

Huck's life is changed by the sudden appearance of his shiftless father, "Pap", an abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap from acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move to the backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father's cabin. Equally dissatisfied with life with his father, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately fakes his own death, and sets off down the Mississippi River.

The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons

While living quite comfortably in the wilderness along the Mississippi, Huck happily encounters Miss Watson's slave Jim on an island called Jackson's Island, and Huck learns that he has also run away. The two team up and shortly after missing their destination, Cairo, Illinois (in a free state to which Jim has planned to escape), Huck and Jim's raft is swamped by a passing steamship, separating the two. Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous local family. He becomes friends with Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the Shepherdsons.

The vendetta comes to a head when Buck's sister, Sophia Grangerford, elopes with Harney Shepherdson. In the resulting conflict, all of the remaining Grangerford males are shot and killed, and upon seeing Buck's corpse, Huck is too devastated to write about everything that happened. However, Huck does describe how he narrowly avoids his own death in the gunfight, later reuniting with Jim and the raft and together fleeing farther south on the Mississippi River.

The Duke and the King

Further down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two cunning grifters, who join Huck and Jim on the raft. The younger of the two swindlers, a man of about thirty, introduces himself as a son of an English duke and his father's rightful successor. The older one, about seventy, then trumps the duke's claim by alleging that he is actually the "Lost Dauphin", the son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "Duke" and the "King" then force Jim and Huck to allow them to travel on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on the way south.

 

As these schemes unfold, Huck sees the attempted lynching of a southern gentleman, Colonel Sherburn, after Sherburn kills a harmless town drunk. Sherburn faces down the lynch mob with a loaded rifle and forces them to back down after an extended speech regarding what he believes to be the essential cowardice of "Southern justice," the lynch mob. (This vignette, which stands out as disconnected from the remaining plot, is thought to represent Twain's own contradictory and misanthropic impulses — Huck, the outcast, essentially flees from Southern society, while Sherburn, the gentleman, confronts it, albeit in a brutal, destructive fashion.[7])

The Duke and the King's schemes reach their peak when the two grifters impersonate the brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. Using an absurd English accent, the King manages to convince most of the townspeople that he and the Duke are Wilks's brothers recently arrived from England, and proceeds to liquidate Wilks's estate. Huck is upset at the men's plan to steal the inheritance from Wilks's daughters and actual brothers, as well as their actions in selling Wilks's slaves and separating their families. To thwart their plans, Huck steals the money the two have acquired and hides it in Wilks's coffin. Shortly thereafter, the two con men are exposed when two other men claiming to be the Wilks's true brothers arrive. However, when the money is found in Wilks's coffin, the Duke and the King are able to escape in the confusion, rejoining Huck and Jim on the raft.

Jim's escape

After the four fugitives flee farther south on their raft, the King "captures" Jim and sells his interest in any reward while Huck is away in a nearby town. Outraged by this betrayal, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience," which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Telling himself "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.

Huck discovers, upon arriving at the house in which Jim is being held, that the King has sold him in a bar for forty dollars. In a parallel to the con men's earlier scheme with the Wilks family, Huck is mistaken by Tom Sawyer's Arkansas aunt, Sally Phelps, for Tom himself, and plays along, hoping to find a way to free Jim. Shortly after, Tom himself arrives, and pretending to be his own half-brother Sid, agrees to join Huck's scheme.

Jim reveals the secret of the Royal Nonesuch before the two rogues are able to set their confidence game into motion. That night the Duke and King are captured by the townspeople, and are tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, hidden tunnels, a rope ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from popular novels,[8] including a note to the Phelps warning them of an Indian tribe stealing their runaway slave. During the resulting pursuit, Tom is shot in the leg, and rather than complete his escape, Jim attends to him and insists that Huck find a doctor in town to treat the injury. This is the first time that Jim demands something from a white person; Huck explains this by saying "I knowed he was white on the inside...so it was all right now." Jim and Tom are then captured and brought back by the doctor.

Conclusion

After Jim's recapture, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Sally arrives and reveals Huck's and Tom's true identities. Tom announces that Jim has been free for months: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom chose not to reveal Jim's freedom so he could come up with an elaborate plan to rescue Jim. Jim tells Huck that Huck's father has been dead for some time and that Huck may return safely to St. Petersburg. (Jim discovered this when he and Huck were on Jackson Island and came upon part of a house drifting down stream. The dead body in the house, the face of which Jim did not let Huck see, was Huck's father.) In the final narrative, Huck declares that he is quite glad to be done writing his story, and despite Tom's family's plans to adopt and "sivilize" him, Huck intends to flee west to Indian Territory.

Answer

The American adolescent novel is the major type of novel in American literature and most of the novelties in this genre belong to Mark Twain. First of all, it is necessary to say that there are two types of Bildungsroman: the ordeal story (the main idea of which is to overcome various difficulties and hardships), the change of hear story. This it what existed in world literature before the novelties of Mark Twain. The main contribution of Mark Twain was that the adolescent (or child) can be either good or bad and this in not important. Twain actually focuses on the society that is bad and requires urgent changes. Mark twain does not mainly focus on character development, he tries to convey his message – the whole American nation needs to get rid of infantile qualities and vices (for example, racism that is still a problem in modern societies).  An interesting idea: “follow a boy on a trip and you will follow him as he goes”. The road has always served as a very important archetype. Another important idea – finding true parents mean finding a true identity. We can see this idea in “The adventures of Huckleberry Fin” where the boy’s real father (or “Pap”) is nothing but a drunkard that tries to gain custody of Huck and keeps him locked up inside his cabin. Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience," and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat." The American adolescent novel is gaining popularity in modern American literature, especially after Salinger’s “The catcher in the rye” appeared. The most important question that always seems to be there was the question of which audience the adolescent novel was actually aimed for. Twain and Salinger admitted that their novels were aimed at an adult audience and the main hero was a teenager (adolescent) because it was the most effective way to shoe the oppressiveness of the grown-up world.  The main features of such a novel are: they show the great energy of teenage protests; the necessity for changes; they take parents among (маргиналы). The last feature is especially important because they do not turn to the people that are accepted by society, they turn to those that are against it and are not accepted. In “The Adventure’s of Huckleberry Fin” he chooses the runaway slave Jim to be his “father”. In Salinger’s book we see practically a very similar situation as in Twain’s. The main themes in this book are alienation as a form of self-protection; the painfulness of growing up; the phoniness of the adult world.

So, when it comes to the relationship between children and adults in these books we can see that the child can be considered the “father” of a man (because children can be wiser than parents and grown –ups at times).

 

42 The lost generation

  The “Lost generation” is a term used to describe the generation of writers active immediately after World War I. Gertrude Stein used the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, supposedly quoting a garage mechanic saying to her, "You are all a lost generation." The phrase signifies a disillusioned postwar generation characterized by lost values, lost belief in the idea of human progress, and a mood of futility and despair leading to hedonism. The mood is described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE (1920) when he writes of a generation that found "all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

"Lost generation" usually refers specifically to the American expatriate writers associated with 1920s Paris, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Hemingway used the phrase "You are all a lost generation" as the epigraph to his first novel THE SUN ALSO RISES (1926), and the influential critic Malcolm Cowley (1898-1989) used "lost generation" in various studies of expatriate writers. The Lost Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who were rebelling against what America had become by the 1900’s. At this point in time, America had become a great place to, “go into some area of business” (Crunden, 185). However, the Lost Generation writers felt that America was not such a success story because the country was devoid of a cosmopolitan culture. Their solution to this issue was to pack up their bags and travel to Europe’s cosmopolitan cultures, such as Paris and London. Here they expected to find literary freedom and a cosmopolitan way of life. A cosmopolitan culture is one which includes and values a variety of backgrounds and cultures. In the 1920's the White Anglo Saxon Protestant work ethic was the only culture that was considered valued by the majority of Americans. It was because of ethics such as this which made the cosmopolitan culture of Paris so alluring. American Literature went through a profound change in the post WWI era. Up until this point, American writers were still expected to use the rigid Victorian styles of the 19th Century. The lost generation writers were above, or apart from,

American society, not only in geographic terms, but also in their style of writing and subjects they chose to write about. Although they were unhappy with American culture, the writers were instrumental in changing their country's style of writing, from Victorian to modern. This temporary emigration of American talent into cosmopolitan cities such as Paris, is significant to American culture in two parts. One, because it aided in the desire for a cosmopolitan culture to be established and to exist in America. Two, because when American Culture became more defined, European and other countries began to recognize a distinctive Democratic American culture. + распечатка, что она давала по 20-м годам))

 

43.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter dreams: a love story, a glittering world of excitement and promise, the destructive nature of the American dream.

 

Plot summary

 

Dexter Green is a middle-class boy who aspires to be part of the "old money" elite. His father owns one of the most profitable grocery stores in the town. He starts out as a teenage golf caddy at a Golf Club in Lake Erminie, Minnesota, which has been suggested is really Black Bear Lake, where Fitzgerald lived for a short time at the Yacht Club. It is when he is caddying that he is first introduced to Judy Jones, a spoiled eleven year old. Dexter works under Judy Jones' father, Mortimer Jones, at the club, and one day decides he is too old to work there. In reality, he quits his job not because of his age but because he doesn't like feeling inferior to the people for whom he is caddying.

After college, Dexter buys a partnership in a laundry business and becomes wealthy and successful. He returns to the Sherry Island Golf Club and is invited to play golf with the men for whom he once caddied. He encounters Judy Jones again on the golf course, only now she is older and amazingly beautiful. Later in the evening Dexter takes a raft out onto the lake, and runs into Judy, who is driving a motor boat. She asks him to take over while she rides on a surfboard attached to the boat. After this encounter, Judy invites Dexter to dinner, where their affair begins. He soon finds that he is one of a dozen men she is stringing along.

After about 18 months, Dexter grows tired of chasing Judy and becomes engaged to Irene Scheerer, a kind but ordinary looking girl, while Judy is vacationing in Florida. When Judy returns, however, she again captures Dexter's heart and asks him to marry her. Dexter breaks off his engagement with Irene, only to be dropped again by Judy a month later. To deal with his heartbreak, Dexter joins the army to fight in World War I.

We next see Dexter several years later as a single, successful New York business man. He meets a client who recalls having attended Judy Jones' wedding. The client describes Judy's husband's alcoholism and torrid affairs, and says that Judy has "faded."

The reality of Judy's life conflicts with Dexter's vision of her, and her downfall destroys Dexter's "winter dreams." The dream of being with her -- an unfulfilled dream -- has kept him from realizing that the glory of his social climb lay in its progression rather than in its fulfillment.

Answer

Dexter’s vision of success involves a pursuit of the American dream of wealth and status. As Fitzgerald traces Dexter’s movement toward this goal, he becomes, in essence, a social historian of his generation, chronicling the dreams of the men and women of the 1920s who saw unlimited opportunities in the new century. Even as a teenager, Dexter dreams of success. While working at a local golf course, he fantasizes about becoming a golf champion and winning matches against the wealthy men for whom he caddies, or dazzling them with his expert diving exhibitions. Later, his dreams involve his movement up into the wealthy class where he would be rich enough to marry Judy Jones. She becomes the embodiment of his “winter dreams” of a glittering world with endless glamour and promise.

Dexter eventually gains wealth and status due to two qualities that are inherent in the American character: hard work and confidence. Even as a young man in his first job, Dexter strives to be the best. At the Sherry Island Golf Club, he is the favorite caddy, due to his devotion to learning and helping others excel at the game. He is such a success in his position that one of the men at the club, “with tears in his eyes,” begs him not to quit. But Dexter is too confident in his abilities to stay in a service position, especially when Judy treats him as her inferior.

Later, he turns his confidence and drive to his education, choosing a prestigious Eastern college over a state school that would have been easier to afford. After college, he dives into the business world, where he learns all he can about running a successful laundry. Soon Dexter achieves his goal: he becomes a wealthy businessman and as such, catches the eye of Judy Jones. Yet, eventually, he discovers the hollowness that exists at the core of his winter dreams.

Hollowness

 

Dexter soon confronts the reality of the glittering world of which he has become a part. That reality is embodied in the character of Judy Jones, who has become the focus of his dreams of success and happiness. Underneath the beauty and vibrancy, however, Judy’s shallowness and destructive character emerge.

Judy’s ultimate goal is the gratification of her own desires, without any concern for those she destroys along the way. As she quickly becomes bored with one suitor, she replaces him with another, yet saves the first for future use. When she decides one of her admirers is beginning to lose interest, she pulls him back into her orbit with promises of fidelity, only to discard him again later. Dexter becomes caught up in this destructive game after he decides she has caused him to be “magnificently attune[d] to life,” to envision her world “radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.” After he enters her world, he and the woman to whom he briefly becomes engaged suffer great pain and disillusionment.

 

Failure

 

At one point, Judy glimpses the hollowness of her existence when she admits, “I’m more beautiful than anybody else.... Why can’t I be happy?” Her and Dexter’s failure to achieve happiness illustrates Fitzgerald’s fundamental criticism of the American dream. At the heart of the dream is an illusory world of glitter and glamour that ultimately contains no substance. While Dexter could have found happiness through a satisfying relationship with Judy, she does not have the strength of character to commit herself to him.

By the end of “Winter Dreams,” Dexter has accepted the failure of his relationship with Judy because he still believes in the glittering dream of her and her world. However, when a business acquaintance tells him that she has lost her youthful beauty and has become a passive housewife to an alcoholic, abusive man, his illusions are shattered. As a result, he concludes, “the gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time.” Ultimately, he grieves not for Judy, but for his lost golden world, “the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”

This story is about having the American Dream, and there are certain themes such as emptiness, power and money, freedom and control, and illusions that play an important role in attaining that dream. The themes that play throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story also play throughout contemporary society, with immigrants who want to enter into the United States to achieve the same American Dream.

 

52. Experiment in the 20th century poetry: T.S. Eliot, ee cummings, Ezra Pounds

American poetry, the history of which spans more than 350 years, is notable for its variety, energy, contrarian tendencies, and feistiness. True, the earliest verse was imitative and derivative, displaying a heavy reliance on British prosody, diction, and verse forms (particularly pastorals, odes, elegies, epistles, and satires). By the nineteenth century, however, poets were expressing an emergent national identity and making significant strides toward liberating themselves from foreign models. By the twentieth century, American poetry commanded international attention and respect, for it had attained a high level of quality--indeed, had achieved parity among the world's poetries, including European poetry.

POETRY 1914-1945: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and improved. He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe's important Chicago magazine Poetry and spearheading the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up in Italian Fascism.

Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to Monroe in 1915, he argues for a modern-sounding, visual poetry that avoids "clichés and set phrases." In "A Few Don'ts of an Imagiste" (1913), he defined "image" as something that "presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound's 1914 anthology of 10 poets, Des Imagistes, offered examples of Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including William Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell.

Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, translations introduced new literary possibilities from many cultures to modern writers. His life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his death. They contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make them difficult. Pound's poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI, "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world," or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as "In a Station of the Metro" (1916):

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he went to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world there. One of the most respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet.

As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the "objective correlative," which he described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" that would be the "formula" of that particular emotion. Poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) embody this approach, when the ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his life in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime.

 E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was American poet, who was one of the most radically experimental and inventive writers of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of Cummings's poetry is the abandonment of uppercase letters. Cummings's poetic style is characterized by typographical nonconformity; distortions of syntax; unusual punctuation; new words; and a liberal use of jazz rhythms, elements of popular culture, and slang. Because of his style, Cummings's poetry appears complex to the eye, but the ideas expressed through the words and punctuation are often simple. Although the emotional content of his poetry appears at first glance to be cynical, it is basically lyrical and almost romantic, often speaking of the value of love. Cummings followed in the Emersonian tradition (Ralph Waldo Emerson) of individuality and rejection of conformity.

 

64. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey : a variety of interpretations

Plot Summary

 

Set in a mental hospital in the 1960's, the novel is the story of Randle Patrick McMurphy, and his attempt to thwart the head of the ward into which he is transferred. The head of the ward is Nurse Ratched, referred to by the patients as the Big Nurse. The story is told in first-person narration through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a six foot two Indian who has pretended for the past thirty years to be deaf and dumb.

When McMurphy arrives at the ward, he immediately sets things on edge, mocking the staff policies and joking with the patients. He reveals himself to be a master gambler, who conned his way into the hospital in an attempt to get an easier sentence. Things are not exactly as he expected, however; the men are shy, frightened mice who can hardly chuckle, and who live in constant terror of the Big Nurse and her indirect attacks. McMurphy makes a bet with them: in one week, he can break down her defenses.

It takes him the whole week, but he manages it; by making fun of her every chance he gets, and going behind her back to get changes made in ward policy. He convinces the men to vote to change the TV viewing time so they can watch the World Series. At first the men are too frightened to go along with it, but he drags them along. When the Big Nurse refuses to accept the vote, he and the rest of the men sit and watch the television anyway, even if it's just a blank screen.

McMurphy holds back on his fights when he learns that the Big Nurse controls when he is released from the hospital. However, he is pulled back in by the suicide of a patient and the needs of the other men. He smashes a fist through the window in the Nurse's station to get at a pack of cigarettes, and when the window is replaced, he smashes it again.

Bromden and McMurphy become friends, and Bromden starts to talk again, almost by accident. McMurphy takes him and a number of the men on a fishing trip, giving them a chance to do things most men take for granted, and their fear starts to go away. However, the Big Nurse tries to chip away at McMurphy's reputation every chance she gets. McMurphy and Bromden are forced into shock therapy after getting into a fight with the black aides.

The men plan an escape for McMurphy, but he sticks around to meet a girl from the outside, who he arranged to meet one of the men, Billy Bibbit. Billy and the girl spend the night together, and when the Big Nurse comes in that morning, she finds the two of them in bed. When she threatens to tell Billy's mother, Billy cuts his throat. McMurphy attacks the Big Nurse, ripping open her shirt and nearly strangling her. He is taken away, and when he returns, he has been lobotomized. He no longer speaks or moves but just lies in bed. Bromden suffocates him with a pillow, then breaks out of the ward, free at last to return to his life.

 

Answer.

Critical Overview

 

When One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was published in 1962, it was well received by the critics and swiftly gained popularity among college-age readers. Critic Malcolm Cowley, one of Kesey's teachers at Standard, commented in a letter to Kesey that the book (which he read in rough draft) contained "some of the most brilliant scenes I have ever read" and "passion like I've not seen in young writers before." R. A. Jelliffe, writing in the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, praised the novel for its brilliant mixture of realism and myth, noting "this is an allegory with a difference." Time magazine praised Kesey for both his power and humor, describing the book as "a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil, despite the macabre setting." While some initial reviews faulted the novel as rambling, the majority agreed with New York Times Book Review contributor Martin Levin that Cuckoo's Nest was "a work of genuine literary merit."

It wasn't long after the novel appeared, however, that criticism arose over its negative portrayal of female characters. Julian Moynahan, for instance, argued in a 1964 New York Review of Books article that Cuckoo's Nest was "a very beautiful and inventive book violated by a fifth-rate idea which made Woman, in alliance with modern technology, the destroyer of masculinity and sensuous enjoyment." Similarly, Marcia L. Falk criticized the popular acceptance of the work and its Broadway adaptation in a 1971 letter to the New York Times. She noted that people "never even noticed, or cared to question, the psychic disease out of which the book's vision was born." Other critics have defended the work by noting, for instance, that the negative female stereotypes are there to support the novel's satire or that these negative characters are not truly representatives of women, but rather representatives of evil. Either way, the novel has inspired many articles analyzing how it portrays gender conflict and defines masculinity and humanity in general. As Richard D. Maxwell wrote in Twenty-Seven to One: "It is apparent that Kesey is not putting the entire blame [on women for men's loss of power]. It is the male who is allowing the female and the corporation to chip away at his masculinity."

Another debated aspect of the novel has been its portrayal of racial groups, specifically the black orderlies who work on the ward. Chief expresses hatred for these men, who are little more than stupid and cruel stereotypes, and he and McMurphy often express their anger with racial slurs. Several critics have pointed out, however, that these men are seen through the mind of the Chief, who himself has been the victim of prejudice as well as the "Combine" that dehumanizes people of all races. In this fashion Chief's racial observations create an ironic commentary on the nature of racism, as Janet R. Sutherland remarked in English Journal: "Just as the reader has to look beyond the typically racist language of the inmate to find in the book as a whole a document of witness against the dehumanizing, sick effects of racism in our society, so Bromden has to look beyond the perception of the world which limits his concept of self."

A large number of articles have examined how the novel defines the role of the hero in a society which stifles individuality, and who exactly is the hero of the novel. While some observers have argued that McMurphy, who through his example and sacrifice shows the men how to escape, is the hero, many others suggest that it is Chief Bromden who is ultimately the hero of the work. While McMurphy leads his "disciple" Bromden to a new understanding, Barry H. Leeds noted in Connecticut Review, "it is not until the very end of the novel that it becomes clear that Bromden has surpassed his teacher in the capacity to survive in American society." Ronald Wallace likewise argued in his The Last Laugh that Bromden rejects the "extreme" of total freedom and chaos that McMurphy represents and "has recreated himself in his own best image: strong, independent, sensitive, sympathetic, and loving, with a comic perspective on his human limitations." In the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Thomas H. Fick placed Bromden's triumph as the hero in the tradition of the mythology of the American West, where a Native American guides a white man to greater understanding. Kesey has turned this myth on its side, noted Fick, creating "the first [instance], surely, that the Indian partner in such a pair has outlived his White brother." The result, concluded the critic, is "a powerful novel which effectively translates into contemporary terms the enduring American concern with a freedom found only in — or in between — irreconcilable oppositions."

 

Or

 

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest has been a critical success since its initial publication, and its popularity has grown throughout the years. The book has been particularly popular on college campuses where diverse disciplines have adopted the text into their curricula and plumbed its rich variety of contexts. Consequently, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest has been subjected to a wide range of critical interpretations. Scholars have variously perceived the novel as a biblical parable, a Western romance in the American tradition, and a story about freedom from institutionalized repression. Other critics have argued that Kesey's writings carry forward the American literary traditions of the Transcendentalists and the Beats as well as the frontier humor and vernacular style established by Mark Twain and developed by American comic books and cartoons. Some reviewers have objected to the novel's negative portrayals of African Americans and women, but other commentators have asserted that the work's apparent racist and sexist outlook is affected by who the reader identifies as the novel's protagonist—Bromden or McMurphy. While the majority of academics has favored Bromden, maintaining that his unbalanced perspective functions as a distorted reaction to dehumanizing social realities, several have argued on behalf of McMurphy, contending that his brash behavior and language represent his means to freedom from repression and false propriety. The debate about the novel's true protagonist has escalated since the release of the film adaptation, which is narrated from McMurphy's perspective rather than Bromden's, but the cinematic version has also occasioned comparisons with the original text on several fronts. Although many scholars have expressed dismay at Kesey's refusal to develop his writing beyond the early promise of his first novel, some have afforded Kesey's subsequent works a modest reception, particularly his novels. While certain critics have lauded Sometimes a Great Notion for its regional accuracy and stylistic complexity, his last two novels—Sailor Song and Last Go Round—have generated scant interest among scholars. Despite the shadow cast by One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest on Kesey's career, many reviewers have also accorded some value to Kesey's other contributions to American literature, including his original and engaging treatment of American traditions, his skillful construction of anecdotes to reveal the spiritual depth of his heroes, and his insights on human nature that illuminate his principal themes of freedom and the moral responsibility of imagination. Besides his literary accomplishments, observers have also regarded Kesey's impact on contemporary American culture for both better and worse, usually citing his own oft-stated preference to “rather live a novel than write one.”