...are ones who have gone over.” - Hunter S. Thompson. Explore the presentation of the troubled mind in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and the poetry of John Keats, with illuminating reference to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “The Edge” described by Hunter S. Thompson is, he says, unexplainable. What seems clear is that ‘the Edge’ is at the limit of the human mind. It can’t be explained, Thompson says, because the only people who ‘really know where it is’ are the ones who ‘have gone over’ it, those who have died or else never returned to ‘reality’ and ‘sanity’. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the poetry of John Keats, and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all describe, in differing ways, states of mind on ‘the Edge’. When they were first published, the contemporary reception to Keats’s poems and to Wuthering Heights was remarkably similar. Keats was described as writing ‘the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language’ , while Bronte’s novel (published under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell) was called ‘too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive’, and described as ‘wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable’ with characters who are ‘savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.’ These accusations of ‘uncouth’, ‘coarse’ and ‘disjointed’ writing suggest that both authors had already crossed one edge with their writing: the edge of what was considered acceptable or respectable literature. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wrote...
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...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....
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...Дневник читателя READER’S JOURNAL Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea (1952). Joseph Heller. Catch-22 (1961). Tennessee Williams. A Streetcar Named Desire (1959). Iris Murdoch. The Black Prince (1973). Jerome David Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient (1992). Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). Edward Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman (1949). ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- Ernest Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea (1952). ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- FULL TITLE · The Old Man and the Sea ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- AUTHOR · Ernest Hemingway ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- TYPE OF WORK · Novella ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- GENRE · Parable; tragedy ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- LANGUAGE · English ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- TIME AND PLACE WRITTEN · 1951, Cuba ------------------------------------------------- ...
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