One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest author and questions

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 5

vwo 6

At the end of today's lesson you will know who Ken Kesey was, what MK-Ultra was and why LSD was part of Kesey's writing process! 

MK-Ultra

Ken Kesey

Merry Pranksters

One flew

how this book came to be

Why the title?

What was MK-Ultra?

Ken Kesey

• September 17th, 1935 - November 10th, 2001. 
• Considered himself the connection between the beat generation and the hippies.  
• Wrote One Flew in 1960, which was published in 1962. 
• His income between writing and publishing: governmental studies  involving hallucinogenic drugs 

Merry Pranksters

• Kesey began hosting "happenings"
• friends from Stanford, bohemian and literary figures 
• Parties were known as 'Acid Tests'
• cross country trip in a school bus named 'Further'. 

Merry Pranksters

• Goal? To create art out of everyday life and to experience roadway America while high on LSD. 
•  Kesey said: The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied. But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest

• Inspiration: while working the night shift in a veterans' hospital.
• often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs he had volunteered to experiment with.
• Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.

How did this book came to be?

• He advocated for drug use as a path to individual freedom.
•  In the 1960s LSD was thought to offer the best access to the human mind. 
• in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America. The 1960s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization, an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel. 

Why was it so important that this book was written in the 1960's?

One Flew...

• Narrated by The Chief 
• The novel constantly refers to different authorities that control individuals through subtle and coercive methods. 
• Nurse Ratched is the personification of the authorities. 

Why the title?

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

Apple seed and apple thorn,

Wire, briar, limber lock

Three geese in a flock

One flew East

One flew West

And one flew over the cuckoo's nest

From a nursery rhyme the Chief's grandmother sang to him.

What is still unclear to you about one flew?