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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Comparison Essay

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Words 1763
Pages 8
Jazmariliz Perez
ENL 336-01
6 November 2015

When reading a novel it is important to notice how the author chooses to have their characters stand out as their own kind of people. In Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” the characters all have their own way of expressing why they act the way they do. One character that stood out the most was of course the narrator and long-term patient in a psychiatric ward, Chief Bromden. In J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” the narrator and young teen Holden Caulfield is also someone who sticks out to readers as someone who wants us to figure him out. Throughout both novels we as readers get the opportunity to learn more about who Chief Bromden and Holden are and what makes them similar and different to each other. Kesey introduces us to Chief Bromden and takes us through his journey and his idea of what society and life is like through his mind and his crazy world. Because he is the narrator we know more about him than any of the characters do. We know that he pretends to be deaf and mute when he says “They don’t bother not talking out loud about their hate secrets when I’m nearby because they think I’m deaf and dumb. …show more content…
He learns that no matter what you will always fall into adulthood because that is what comes with life. Everyone eventually grows up and it is just a matter of how you choose to handle it and how everything around you helps or doesn’t help you along the way. Bromden finds his sense of hope that he has desperately been searching for and he knows that life doesn’t have to mean fitting in. You don’t have to conform to society and its rules. No matter what the psych ward will always be there it is just a matter of knowing how to accept and deal with it. He is the symbol of society’s change throughout the text. Both Kesey and Salinger portrayed the journey of an individual that exists outside the mainstream

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