Lauren, I really liked how you connected the lives of the authors of both books to the actual story that they had written. I was quite surprised to learn how similar the lives of the authors were in comparison to the story line of both books. Although they stumped me, I also liked how you made direct questions to me in your post. Until you mentioned it, I had not considered how the personal experiences of the authors affected the plot. Based on your previous posts, I am sure that you also agree with me that Ken Kesey’s decision to partake in a drug study was rather unique. Just like I guessed, that experience motivated him to write his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It makes me laugh how much you despise this book, especially when you hinted that this book was not as “fantastic” as it seems to be. Your last comment really stumped me. I have not read any other of his works, and based on that I would not be able to correctly answer whether or not the drugs that he took pushed him to be a better writer. However, I can infer that the story of the book would have been much more different because he would not have been able to narrate a book from the perspective of a mental ward if he was not able to experience the types of situations that he wrote about. I can also infer that the drug study left a profound mark on his lifestyle because in my reading about him, I came across how he threw parties which were based on drug effects, and he was also arrested for the possession of marijuana. After reading his biography, the respect that I had for him both decreased and it also increased. I think that I began to respect him more as an author after reading his biography because it proved that he was capable of being motivated by anything. The specific subject that Ken Kesey was motivated by decreased the respect I had for him because he took inspiration from something that society looks down upon—and that is drug usage. I can see how this book has a negative effect on its audience. In a way, it serves as a motivator for readers to try drug usage and I think that the message in the book is completely negative.
In this post however, I really wanted to focus on how the side characters in both books saw and reacted to the events that unfolded before them. I think that in both cases, both the Head Nurse and Leper are major characters in their appropriate books but they are not given much representation. i can relate why the Head Nurse was so mad at McMurphy for causing chaos in the ward as soon as he arrived. I am sure that I would be really angry if someone came into my work space and quickly began to destroy the systems that I had set up and as a result, he would have also quickly taken the popularity that I worked so hard to build. In fact, if someone did that to me, I would have been crushed. If I were in the place of the Head Nurse, I would have let the ward run according to the way that the patients had wanted rather than trying to get back at my competition for taking away by power over the ward. In a way, I think that the Nurse was right to be strict with those under her control who disobeyed and mocked her power. If she had been a bit more relaxed, the might have been a possibility that events would have turned out differently for the rest of the ward. Although she was unliked for her strict behavior, I feel that the characters in the story did not find the need to find the reason behind her behavior—she might have felt insecure of her head position, or she might have wanted have a strict behavior with the patients so that she could work one step closer to their cure.
I think that the Head Nurse and Leper do not have a lot in common because the head nurse was more of the controlling type of people while I thought that Leper was more of the background person in the second book. His experience had a great effect one the story line of A Separate Peace just as the Head Nurse effected the story in the first book. However, the nurse’s actions were the result of her direct involvement while Leper’s actions were more indirect. Because he was one of the first who enlisted in the war, the other boys who wanted to enlist also had someone to look up to. His reactions to the enlisting forced the other boys to change their opinion about working in the war.
After reading these two books, I began to feel sorry for the way that Leper was treated. Not just him, but many other soldiers come home after their service with a broken heart—that it if they return home. I feel that his school community was not considerate at all. He just came from a sensitive situation, and he was immediately put into another one with Finny’s hearing. All in all, I think that both of these characters influenced their corresponding stories much more than what we had given them credit for.
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