One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey (1962)
“Written by a man who took LSD in a VA hospital and emerged with a parable about who really gets to define sanity.”
Character Analysis
An Irish-American working-class rebel — brawler, gambler, accused statutory rapist — who transfers from prison to the ward expecting an easier time. He is simultaneously the most alive and the most doomed person in the novel. His power is charisma and physical presence; his weakness is that he can't stop performing the role once the patients need him to be their savior. He is not a saint — he wins money from the patients at cards, he uses people as audience — but his life force is real and his sacrifice is real. He dies because the institution has no mechanism for tolerating someone who refuses to become institutional.
Working-class profane American — contractions everywhere, slang, profanity, nicknames. He calls Ratched 'Big Nurse' and 'Miss Rat-shed.' He never uses clinical vocabulary without sarcasm.