What? Are You Nuts?

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," by Ken Kesey, is a book about a bunch of nuts in the good old days of the state system for the allegedly insane.

It is written from the perspective of Chief Bromden, and has rather excellent views of insanity and how it was treated back in the good ole days.

Throw in a lusty and loud raucous fella, Randle Patrick McMurphy, and oddly, the system, which kept people in horrifically long, suddenly has shortened time served for being not as nuts as the system made them think they were.

McMurphy seems to be a metaphor for the trickster. Here comes the trickster playing his tricks, having a good time, and reawakening the people to what they actually are, only to be bitten back by his tricks in the end, but not until he reaches the end, which seems to be, in this story, a reawakening of the people who are in distress. It's a trickster story!

Now I'm off to read, "Gulag," by Anne Applebaum, which won the Pulitzer Prize. It is a history of, have you guessed? That's right! The Gulag system in the U.S.S.R. I also plan on reading Alexander Schotzenytsn's (sp?) "Gulag Archipelago" sometime in the months or years to come.