First thoughts on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I despair that I will not finish this before book club next week. However, I am enjoying it after having some trouble getting started. The voice of Bromden takes some getting used to. I think I reach the boundaries of my intellect (or of my Asperger's) when I try to interpret an author's meaning and choices. It's kind of thrilling in a solipsistic way to find a well-defined boundary to such a thing. Anyways, I can see the Ken Kesey is making a specific and conscious artistic choice to narrate the story through the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic (?) although one review I read said it did a disservice to Chief Bromden to frame him in psychiatric trappings. What I can't figure is why he made this choice.

It's also impossible to read this without thinking about the movie. At any rate, I'm enjoying the very visual prose. The care Kesey takes to describe the calluses on McMurphy's palms or Bromden's visit to a cotton gin when he was a teenager. Kesey spends a lot of time actually describing hands I notice. It makes me think about the non-fiction writer Richard Preston. In his preface to Panic in Level 4, he says he always asks the person he is writing about if he can see their hands. For a doctor at USAMRID, he was able to visualize and empathize with her story about cutting her hands in the morning in her kitchen, going to work on a Level 4 autopsy, and cutting her glove with a dirty scalpel. She ran through decontamination fearing she had broken the skin and infected herself with an unspecified hemorrhagic fever. It turned out the blood in her internal glove was where her cut had reopened.

Preston said hands were a way he learned about the subject. Not that that's what Kesey is doing, it's just how I'm perceiving it.

I loved this line from McMurphy which is fine advice for life:

"You ever been kneed in the nuts in a brawl, buddy? Stops you cold, don't it? There's nothing worse. It makes you sick, it saps every bit of strength you got. If you're up against a guy who wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger, than watch for his knee, he's gonna go for your vitals."