The VictimKen Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

The nervous ailments dealt with in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are of a very different order to the paranoia felt by the protagonists in The Victim. The characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are actually considered mad, and so the novelist deals with their problems in a different way and also has a considerably different view as to how their ailments were caused. While Bellow seems to suggest that the reasons for Leventhal's and Allbee's paranoid feelings came from within themselves rather than being caused by society, Kesey strongly suggests that the residents of the ward in his novel are there because they could not cope with the pressures put on them by society to conform, and that their madness is caused by others, rather than originating within the men themselves.

Kesey also deals with the ineffective way in which these men are 'treated' for their various aliments. He constantly alludes to the way that the in...