One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

For my paper, I have chosen to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. The novel is 280 pages long, and so far, I have read 160 pages. With two more four-hour plane rides this Sunday and Tuesday, I expect to be very close to finishing it by early this week—unless there’s a REALLY good in-flight movie. I am really enjoying the classic novel: its fame and that of the movie based on it is not unfamiliar to me, and so far it is living up to that prestige.

Several specific aspects in particular appeal to me, and each of them is a potential topic for my paper.

First, I am interested in the parable-like qualities of the novel: clearly it is an anti-establishment piece of writing based on Kesey’s own views of the Vietnam War and of the counterculture movement. If I choose to write about this topic, I would delve into Kesey’s personal biography further and also study the specific historical context of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Another possible essay topic is the biblical allusions and religious significance of the novel: McMurphy is famously a Christ-like figure, and I would potentially be interested in exploring this more.

Finally, I may be interested in exploring the significance of Chief Bromden as narrator, including whether he is biased or unbiased, and why Kesey chose him to narrate. Stay tuned!

"One Art": her finger and her thumb in the shape of an "L" on her forehead

In her poem “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop conveys a personal crisis through a classic villanelle form. She does so gradually; she does not reveal the true nature of her crisis until the last stanza of the poem. Before then, the poem is a catalogue of the things the speaker (essentially, Bishop herself) has lost. Though she constantly insists that all of these losses are “no disaster” nor is the loss of such things “hard to master,” the final stanza reveals quite a different attitude. And Bishop attempts to clarify any potential ambiguity by using syntactical and grammatical devices including parentheses, italics, exclamation points, and inverted syntax. In this way, the reader becomes painfully aware of the true emotional state of the speaker.

In order to fully comprehend “One Art” and the message behind it, the reader must first understand the background of both the author and the poetic form she uses. The poem is in the form of a villanelle. Such a poetic form has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the poem rhyme, and these two words alternate as the final line of each successive stanza. The pattern continues until the final stanza, where the two rhymes form a couplet at the end. Villanelles are composed of nineteen lines, organized into five tercets and one quatrain. Elizabeth Bishop herself suffered from tremendous loss early in her life, when both of her parents died when she was still very young. Just before she wrote the poem, two of her lovers died as well, including one by suicide.

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker evidently is trying to convince herself that the losses she has experienced are bearable and conquerable, an argument she ultimately loses to herself (how’s that for irony?). The poem reads almost as a twelve-step program to overcome great loss. She tries to rise above her loss by even encouraging others to try it, too when she says, “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys…” (4-5). Then the speaker urges the reader or listener to take their practice to a higher level, by “losing farther, losing faster” (7). In the fourth stanza, she tries to convince herself that loss is a part of everyday life. She goes through the laundry list of items, places and people she has lost: her mother’s watch, her house, two cities, some realms, two rivers, a continent (?). Yet all of these (even the continent) are not the real issue for the speaker.

“One Art” is quite remarkable in that the crux of the poem is not revealed, not even partially understood, until the very last stanza. The final stanza is the speaker’s true problem, the one thing she lost that is a disaster, that is hard to master: “you.” Presumably, the speaker is referring to a significant other who has recently passed away. After she thinks about her lover, she even admits to having lied earlier in the poem when she says, “I shan’t have lied” (17). The reader can envision the speaker literally forcing herself to confess to her true emotional state; when she says “Write it!” (19), one can tell that the physical one of writing the poem is a difficult process for the speaker. It is also in the last stanza that the reader can infer that the speaker and the author are one and the same. When the speaker says, “Write it,” she gives away her true identity; the speaker herself is the author of the poem, Elizabeth Bishop.

Spread the Wealth (in a non-Communist way)

In class on Friday, I asked the class whether they thought Death of a Salesman had feminist undertones at all. I posed the question because I thought at the time that Linda Loman was a far stronger personality than all the men, including Willy, Happy, Biff, and Howard. When she pushes the flowers out of Happy’s hands and calls her own two sons “a pair of animals,” the viewer wants to applaud her for standing up for what she believes in. Yet when I thought about this scene more, I realized that her seemingly bold, self-confident action was in fact the best manifestation of her hopelessness pitiful position in the family. She continues to defend her husband and remains loyal to the end, even though he lost his loyalty to her eighteen years ago. He continues to keep secrets from her, yet she continues to trust him. Out of frustration and anger she yells at Biff and Happy, saying “You and your lousy rotten whores!” yet if she were truly self-aware, self-assertive, and an independent feminist spirit, she would be saying this to her husband. When I first read Death of a Salesman, I thought that Linda was being a hero by standing up for Willy and staying by his side at a time when he seems like the loneliest man in the world. Yet she is little more than the stereotypical suburban 1950s wife, since she believes that what her husband thinks is automatically what is righteous. She adds further to the pain of both Happy and Biff by telling them to “get out of here, both of you, and don’t come back!” Willy always had a place in his home for his sons, yet Linda now does not. Immediately after she unleashes her hopeless verbal tirade on her sons, Biff says, “Now you hit it on the nose! The scum of the earth, and you’re looking at him!” The stage direction even says that Biff is “on the floor…with self-loathing.” It is easy for critics to look at Death of a Salesman and point to Willy’s negligence and poor paternal instincts as the reason for Biff’s “failure,” yet Linda clearly has not helped the situation. She is the one who has been at home all these years, while Willy has been on the road. Sure, Biff saw Willy having an affair and blames this event for his entire future, but Happy who knows nothing of the affair, has led a similarly unsuccessful life. And Linda must share part of the blame. There certainly is enough to go around.

Victim or Failure?

In what ways do you find Nora a victim? In what ways at fault?

Upon reviewing the first two acts of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, I have come to the conclusion that Nora is primarily a victim of a series of circumstances outside of her control. She does what she thinks is right. Her poor judgment of what is righteous and appropriate—not any evil intention—is her primary character flaw. When she asks Krogstad, “Isn’t a daughter entitled to try and save her father from worry and anxiety on his deathbed? Isn’t a wife entitled to save her husband’s life?” she seems to be asking two completely sincere, rational questions. She steps out of the boundaries drawn for her as a woman by society. But she also crosses another boundary; she seems to have no sense of guilt at the time that she forges her own father’s name to receive the money that she is not allowed to receive. In these ways, she is at fault. Yet she reacts sensibly and in a way that anybody can relate to. She is facing extraordinary circumstances—a dying father and an ill husband, both of whom she at least thinks she loves very much—and she reacts with extraordinary, but in her mind necessary, measures. Nora is in many ways a victim of society. The measures she takes would have been unnecessary if she were a man in the same time and place, because women were not allowed to sign the document that Nora needed signed. Her dishonesty is of course less than admirable, but I believe that it is the price she had to pay to save at least her husband. Her behavior would certainly have been hard to understand in that time period, but that is precisely Ibsen’s point. He resents the extreme actions a woman like Nora would have to make to accomplish the same thing that a man could accomplish very easily. To interpret Nora as a villain who did an evil thing is to miss Ibsen’s primary message of A Doll’s House. Sure, she was dishonest, and maybe she should have felt more guilt at the time. But she was a victim more of society than of her own personal flaws.

Ophelia Song

***To be sung to the tune of Cecilia by Simon and Garfunkel***
***Note: if you are unfamiliar with the original song, do yourself the favor of going to www.seeqpod.com, typing in "Cecilia Simon and Garfunkel," and listening to the first result before reading this post.***

Ophelia, it’s breaking my heart
To have to pretend that I’m crazy
But Ophelia, you’ve got to believe
That I saw my dead father’s ghost

Ophelia, the ghost told Ham the truth
That Claudius killed him for his wife
Oh Ophelia, Hamlet can’t tell you this
‘Cuz he must avenge his dad’s ghost
(His dad’s ghost…)

Well your dad is Polonius
And Ophelia, he is quite a wuss (Quite a Wuss!)
He makes you Claudius’s pawn
And when Hamlet comes back with a clean face, you’re gone.

Ophelia, your boyfriend’s gone mad
He must kill Claude for killing his dad
Oh Ophelia, it’s still not act four,
And Hamlet stares you down as he walks out the door.

Ophelia, when will it all end?
When will he come home to caress you?
Oh Ophelia, it might take the whole play.
Cuz this is one of Shakespeare’s trage-days.

Ophelia, Hamlet’s killed your old dad,
And that must make you really mad
Ophelia, now you sing and you dance
And you want to send Hamlet to France.
(To-oo France)

But Ophelia, to Britain he’s sent.
To keep him away from his own two parents
And Ophelia, I haven’t read Act Five yet
So I don’t know what becomes of young Hamlet

Jubilation! I still have Act Five!
And I still don’t know what happens.
Jubilation! I can’t wait till Act Five!
To see if Ophelia comes out dead or alive.

I am posting this early, so the commenters don't kill me.

Oh Oedipus, Oedipus, Oedipus Rex
Fated to kill his father, and with his mother have sex
And now his sister is also his daughter
What that is like, I cannot even guess.

The young man became king after solving a riddle
Given by the Sphinx: he knew adulthood came in the middle
He succeeded Laius, who was in fact his father,
And he led the Thebeians both with strength and with valor

Until a plague struck the city of Thebes,
And our hero, with hubris, said he’d end the disease
He sent his brother-in-law Creon, who was also his uncle
To travel to Delphi, and discover the source of the junk-le

So Uncle Creon talked to the god Apollo,
Whose advice Oedipus knew he surely should follow
Until he found out Apollo called him a killer
Which is when Sophocles turns it into a thriller.

Oedipus, disbelieving, demanded the truth
So he could clear his own name and stop saying “forsooth!”
He sent Uncle Creon, apparently a slave
To send for Tereisias, whose vision was grave

Indeed the prophet was blind, whereas Oedipus saw
But on his side most surely wasn’t the law
At first the blind man refused to say what he knew,
But Oedipus insisted to hear what was true

Though the prophet insisted the truth would hurt,
He had to follow the orders of his king, who was becoming quite curt.
So he told him the truth: what the oracle said,
Yet Oedipus was left there just scratching his head

At what it could mean, at all of these lies
So he called in Jocasta, his mother and wife
And he asked her to tell him all that she knew
About the day his father had been beaten in two

She knew that it happened where three roads converged
And it was here that her story and Oedipus’s did merge
For he too had been there, one night years ago,
And there he had taken others’ lives, to protect his own.

Once he conquered the Sphinx and became Thebes’s king,
He did what was right and gave Jocasta a ring,
Yet it was not right, for she was his mother
And with her he did give birth to his own sisters and brothers.

What lessons can be learned from Oedipus’s tragic tale?
When one tries to avoid fate, one often fails
Yet the choices one makes will affect his whole life
Just make better choices than choosing your mom to be your wife.

Will you scratch by back? I think I have an Ilych!

Leo Tolstoy’s novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an unusual piece of literature in many ways. It begins with the ending; over half the novel is about the protagonists death, not his life; only one of the characters, Gerasim, is an exemplary person; and universal themes such as love and happiness are virtually absent. Yet my favorite part of the novella is the mastery with which Tolstoy depicts one’s life as foreshadowing one’s death. The protagonist and title character, Ivan Ilych, leads a shallow, artificial life. When he gets married, the speaker points out, “Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he hoped, would have an equal income” (70). Ilych’s marriage is based on little more than money, and his wife demonstrates this too at his funeral when Peter Ivanovich realizes that “her chief concern with him—namely, to question him as to how she could obtain a grant of money from the government on the occasion of her husband’s death” (47). Ilych gets as little enjoyment out of his job as he does from his marriage, and each has the same motivation for him: money. When he gets promoted to examining magistrate, he feels that “everyone without exception, even the most important and self-satisfied, was in his power…” (65). When he is promoted again to Assistant Public Prosecutor, “His new duties, their importance, the possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the publicity his speeches received, and the success he had in all these things, made his work still more attractive” (79). Yet never does he take a job for the joy that it gives him, nor does he often show compassion towards his wife and his seldom-mentioned children. He has no “friends,” only “acquaintances.” And all of this is reflected in his death: just as monotonous, lonely, and tragic as his life. As he is dying, “He began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had seemed…all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty” (301). He realizes that his death is monotonous: the doctor comes, Ilych refuses to take the medication, his wife comes in to visit, Ilych kicks her out, Gerasim lends his body to rest Ilych’s legs, and Ilych finally realizes what kindness and happiness is, as it is reflected in Gerasim. He realizes, “’Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse’” (313). Indeed, his life and death followed similar trajectories, both ending in much pain and sorrow.