Insanity As Redemption On Contemporary American Fiction By Barbara Tepa Lupack

Insanity as Redemption on Contemporary American Fiction is a book written Barbara Tepa Lupack. This books holds six chapters about six different literary pieces including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s chapter, “Hail to the Chief”. It mainly talks about “inmates running the asylum.” In the specified chapter of the novel, Lupack gives some introductory paragraphs about Ken Kesey, his life and his reasons for writing this story. Barbara Tepa Lupack says Ken Kesey was a “psychedelic outlaw and a madman” who was nicknamed “Dr. Strange.” He was a close friend to a man named Lovell who worked in a mental institution. This friend helped Kesey to get a job at the institution and then discover all the hidden details and secrets about mentality, illness and the methods of treatments that were used on the patients there. Kesey tried several types of drugs and medicines and went under some treatments, such as “Ditran, LSD, and other hallucinogens (especially peyote and mescaline)”. After spending some time in the institution, he wrote two novels, the second
Gregory Shafer published a very interesting essay entitled Madness and Difference: Politicizing Insanity in Classic Literary Works. He discusses how madness in society and madness in literature can both be politicized, whether it was falsely diagnosed or not. “No other literary work more powerfully explores the world of madness and insanity than Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest— Cuckoo’s Nest delves into the political aspects of such words and the status of the people who are branded with maladies. More importantly, Cuckoo’s Nest suggests that the asylum that is the setting pf the novel is also a microcosm for the world that often is crazy, manipulative, and mendacious— a world that prevents revolt by labeling iconoclasts as deranged and