There are two 1st person narrators in The Collector who are telling the event from each point of view. The story is dictated by Ferdinand's recollective report. Miranda's part is told as a diary, also in past tense, but unlike Ferdinand's account, it gives a feeling of being told in present time and thus synchronal with the actions. They are both trustworthy and unreliable; the meticulously described events are detailed and credible, but the narrators' way of thinking and acting interfere with common perception of them as credible people.
Kidnapping and keeping a person looked up in a cellar of ones house is not a normal behaviour which does Ferdinand basically unreliable. The impression of disparity is further strengthened when he thinks his prisoner Miranda will start to like him just if he makes sure she is welled treated and is getting what she wants, as if feeding and turning a chrysalis into another butterfly to his collection. He ruminates this fixed idea throughout the story. “Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. // I thought, I can't ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she's with me, she'll see my good points, she'll understand. There was always the idea she would understand. (Fowles 19) I said I'd buy anything she wanted. (35) I just want you to try and understand me as much as you can and like me a little if you can.” (46)
Miranda is constantly comparing her life in captivity and the life she had in liberty with characters in books, plays, or art, describing things as an art student sees them, or using George Paston's (G.P) ideas, of her highly esteemed artist mentor, to define the world - as if she hermaphroditical is bringing forth her state of chrysalis longing for a butterfly metamorphosis. “I'll marry him [G.P.] if he wants. I want the adventure // Clever at knowing but not at living. I want his children in me. My body doesn't count any more. If he just wants that he can have it. // He has the secret of life in him (247)// I will give myself to G.P. He can have me. And whatever he does to me I shall still have my woman-me he can never touch.” (248)
Both Ferdinand and Miranda are shielded from the world, each one in his own way, even before their common stay in the house. It seems as if Miranda has just as much of an obsessive way of seeking and creating essence out of existence as Ferdinand. Now if an author want to refine that point of view it becomes more reliable to a reader if he lets those characters carry their own voices; it is easier to relate to people's obscure ideas if an unreliable narrator is speaking of his own in 1st person narrator because an “I” associates directly with a readers “I” which makes thoughts and actions in a novel plausible, as if the reader himself were being addressed.
What reader would really trust that there exist a Ferdinand if an author lets a 3rd person narrator retell events taking place inside the walls of such a house; characters and actions would risk to appear to distant to associate and cope with.
REFERENCE LIST
Fowles, John (1998[1963]). The collector. London: Vintage
Thursday, 4 July 2013
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey): Elements of Fiction; Settings
The temporal setting of the novel is about the 1960s – in the state of Oregon in America, maybe Oregon City – due to the narrator's personal events, which he occasionally returns to, as a child before the war in Europe and Germany, there he later probably served as a soldier in the U.S. Army. When the narrator in the present time of the story mentions memories in the past at the ward they have often taken place a number of years back, about older memories before the time at the hospital he uses phrases like “a long time ago”. He notices, from the car towards the ocean, new types of communities with thousands of identical kids and houses “linked together like sausages” (204) constructed during the post war building boom.
The atmosphere of the novel gives a feeling of breathing and suffocating, of humour and oppression, it is pulsating forth and back indoors at a hospital in locked rooms with few windows to the outer world. When the story is filled with the patients spirited conversations, jokes and crazy antics the pressure eases significantly. The feeling of suffocating becomes so much stronger with the narrator's experience and description of the hospital as a part of a pulsating machine – due to his probably former service in the U.S. Army as a telegraphist and his technical equipment – that releases fog and keeping the patients trapped, or with nature descriptions of the external world or the few times the story actually moves out in the open.
The physical setting of the novel is a mental ward, mostly indoors, where the doors to the outside world are locked which enhances the reader's perception of the protagonists' own experience of lockups or longing for either physical or psychological freedom. The frustration is further heightened inside the hospital where patients and staff are separated in terms of dress and in designated locked areas and upstairs there is that notorius Disturbed ward where potential assualtive may be sent and treated in “The Shock Shop”, the Electro Shock Therapy where “you are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap!” ( 65 pp).
REFERENCE LIST
Kesey, Ken (1976). One flew over the cuckoo's nest: a novel.
30th anniversary ed. New York: Penguin
The atmosphere of the novel gives a feeling of breathing and suffocating, of humour and oppression, it is pulsating forth and back indoors at a hospital in locked rooms with few windows to the outer world. When the story is filled with the patients spirited conversations, jokes and crazy antics the pressure eases significantly. The feeling of suffocating becomes so much stronger with the narrator's experience and description of the hospital as a part of a pulsating machine – due to his probably former service in the U.S. Army as a telegraphist and his technical equipment – that releases fog and keeping the patients trapped, or with nature descriptions of the external world or the few times the story actually moves out in the open.
The physical setting of the novel is a mental ward, mostly indoors, where the doors to the outside world are locked which enhances the reader's perception of the protagonists' own experience of lockups or longing for either physical or psychological freedom. The frustration is further heightened inside the hospital where patients and staff are separated in terms of dress and in designated locked areas and upstairs there is that notorius Disturbed ward where potential assualtive may be sent and treated in “The Shock Shop”, the Electro Shock Therapy where “you are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns. You are touched on each side of the head with wires. Zap!” ( 65 pp).
REFERENCE LIST
Kesey, Ken (1976). One flew over the cuckoo's nest: a novel.
30th anniversary ed. New York: Penguin
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey): Two Questions
If we assume the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest could be interpreted as a critique of a society and its mental ward an allegory of a Western European society you might examine the following questions that reflect on important issues the novel highlights.
When is an informal leadership dangerous to a society? This question is relevant because it makes you examine how such a society works beyond the official political agenda. You get the opportunity to interpret its sequential and structural mechanisms, how they mutually interact and differ from each other. In this way, you may find both pros and cons of the informal nature of the leadership, but also get ideas on how to overcome its most destructive aspects.
Why are people inclined to create characters of themselves based on the attitudes of others? This question is relevant because it provides you an opportunity to examine and detect conditions within a society that cause people to not stand up for themselves. The issue highlights the psychosocial connections or shortcomings that hamper a person's view of himself and his role in society and thereby the question simultaneously evokes calls for suggestions of ways on how to tackle and prevent this problem.
REFERENCE LIST
Kesey, Ken (1976). One flew over the cuckoo's nest: a novel.
30th anniversary ed. New York: Penguin
When is an informal leadership dangerous to a society? This question is relevant because it makes you examine how such a society works beyond the official political agenda. You get the opportunity to interpret its sequential and structural mechanisms, how they mutually interact and differ from each other. In this way, you may find both pros and cons of the informal nature of the leadership, but also get ideas on how to overcome its most destructive aspects.
Why are people inclined to create characters of themselves based on the attitudes of others? This question is relevant because it provides you an opportunity to examine and detect conditions within a society that cause people to not stand up for themselves. The issue highlights the psychosocial connections or shortcomings that hamper a person's view of himself and his role in society and thereby the question simultaneously evokes calls for suggestions of ways on how to tackle and prevent this problem.
REFERENCE LIST
Kesey, Ken (1976). One flew over the cuckoo's nest: a novel.
30th anniversary ed. New York: Penguin
The Collector (Fowles) & One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey): a Comparative Essay
The first rising action of The Collector takes place when a young woman gets kidnapped by a reclusive man in order to establish a love affair. He locks her up in the basement of his huge house in the countryside and starts providing for her immediate needs – as if she were another chrysalis in his collection of butterflies – in the hope that she will evolve and begin to like him. When she does not develop any kind of affection for him, he leaves her to die of pneumonia in the cellar.
The unstable situation at the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the inmates' fight for their human values within the relationship with the head administrator. The patients are systematically humiliated which aggravates their state of psychological immobility and decreases their ability to look upon themselves as nothing but insane. Those who stubbornly refuse to subordinate themselves literally fade away, either they die physically or get mentally killed by means of neurosurgical procedure, as lobotomy.
The themes which are to be discussed in this paper are related to the conflict between individuals with power and those without within a group of people; of liberty and subordination; how power corrupts and erases individuals' ability to compassion; how the vicious circle of powerlessness consumes individuals. The thesis statement of this essay is that both authors, Ken Kesey and John Fowles, bring to light that dominant people being challenged use every possible means to put down any insurgency to remain in omnipotent control. Two of the main characters in the novels carry this attitude which causes deep human suffering and death. For the sake of human rights a society must do everything in its power to trace, cure and prevent such conducts. The discussion will also put forward how the physical setting, closed spaces, is used throughout the novels to create an atmosphere of oppression in order to heighten the exposedness of powerless people.
The big locked mental hospital is situated on the border to nature and civilisation which heightens the illusion of possible freedom. One of its wards is ruled with instinctive feeling by the antagonist and flat static character Big Nurse. That is what she is called by the first person narrator, patient Bromden, an unreliable but round and dynamic character. The more Big Nurse successfully manipulates her control of the ward, the more the hospital takes the form of a mechanical system in the narrator's description.
Big Nurse's initial position is always the manipulative gentle way. As long as everyone follows her unwritten laws, she smiles and speaks kindly to all. As soon as someone challenges her hidden authority by somehow not putting up with what is decided she slides unnoticed over to her suppression techniques which she daily refines during the various group meetings. She recaptures power by influencing the patients to feel shame of themselves and thus completely disarming them. This is the exposition of the story when the new admission, and inciting incident, McMurphy, the protagonist, shows up, a flat dynamic character and Big Nurse's greatest challenge of all times. However, Big Nurse will win the showdown because her need to be in power does not shun any means – she governs unrestricted and without limits.
From the inside of her office on the ward, a glass station, she gazes out over the patients' day room and supervises the patients' activities. It is to this office she retreats with her woven wicker bag in which she keeps the logbook with all the notes about the patients' behaviour: the nutritional supplements she needs to manifest and exercise power. It is here in the glass station she keeps the patients' confiscated cigarettes when they do not fulfil their household chores according to her orders. There are those packet of cigarettes McMurphy wants to reach when he breaks the glass pane the first time – and intensifies the action of the story. He smashes the window a second time out of anger because Big Nurse has given him suspension of leave. When she insinuates McMurphy is to be responsible for the death of two inmates he loses his temper and smashes the pane of glass a third time. They are one another's foil characters. Versus McMurphy's unchecked violent one-man rebellion Big Nurse demonstrates authority by displaying a calm dismissive attitude. She will not on any account give in.
Sometimes she needs to, however, open the door and step out in the world of the patients to hold meetings and tighten the thumbscrews – take notes, fill up her log book – if power is slipping out of her fingers. Her underlying basic principal on how to control the world she mainly uses the classical method of divide and rule. Initially Big Nurse softly rejects McMurphy's proposals about how he wants to change things at the ward. She explains her repudiation by saying she can not satisfy his selfish needs because the ward is for everyone. He accepts and responds to her declarations with humour and irony. Out of her sight and in front of the other inmates he is betting money that he can break her in a week.
After McMurphy has initiated his rebellion against Big Nurse's reign even the other patients take courage and start demanding change. Big Nurse becomes silent, sometimes smiling, sometimes she puts on a stone face and keeps the chatter among the inmates rolling. She is just biding her time. What McMurphy does not know yet is that he has issued her a challenge which she has accepted and she intends to make an example of him. The falling of the action starts when he finally understands his conditions of discharge; the more it dawns on him the more the ward – the coffin – closes on him. As his protests become more violent Big Nurse sees her chance to manifest her power further. She will make sure he gets locked up for life, it does not matter to what end, as a subdued patient or a vegetable.
At the large enclosed house in the countryside, far from heavy traffic and city lights it is Caliban who rules, as his prisoner Miranda calls him. Both are first person narrators – she extinguishes his initial unreliability by confirming his story – simultaneously antagonists and protagonists, flat and static characters. Caliban has meticulously created the interior of the house as a hierarchic mini universe of several levels. He dwells upstairs like a God and Miranda in the basement as his intended offspring. She is the subject in his human experiment in planting love feelings. He ascends to the mezzanine and invites her with meals and social gathering.
In these meetings he has a hope of winning her heart by providing for her what she is fond of, as music records, books and art magazines. She responds to his desire by alternately praying and demanding her freedom. He treats her pleadings by adapting and refining the house in believing that she will choose him in the end. The fall of the action starts when she rejects his marriage proposal and he finally says he will not let her go.
The climax of the story is when her struggle for freedom turns into physical violence. She tries to kill him with an ax. She tries to seduce him. She lets him take pornographic photographs of her. Nothing moves him. He resists all her attempts to soften him to open the door to freedom. He knows she would be lost forever. The chrysalis that should redeem her love becomes instead the coffin in which she finally fades away and dies - ironically in a cold infected by him.
Caliban and Big Nurse are characterised by a complete lack of empathy and emotions for others. They show through their narcissistic behaviour that they do not shun any means in nourishing and maintaining their positions with adamant laws like Old Testament Gods in their respective universes. Caliban and Big Nurse let people die in order to reign – the resolution of the stories – elevated over mankind.
Works Cited
Fowles, John. The Collector. London: Vintage, 1998. Print.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Novel. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 1976. Print.
The unstable situation at the ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the inmates' fight for their human values within the relationship with the head administrator. The patients are systematically humiliated which aggravates their state of psychological immobility and decreases their ability to look upon themselves as nothing but insane. Those who stubbornly refuse to subordinate themselves literally fade away, either they die physically or get mentally killed by means of neurosurgical procedure, as lobotomy.
The themes which are to be discussed in this paper are related to the conflict between individuals with power and those without within a group of people; of liberty and subordination; how power corrupts and erases individuals' ability to compassion; how the vicious circle of powerlessness consumes individuals. The thesis statement of this essay is that both authors, Ken Kesey and John Fowles, bring to light that dominant people being challenged use every possible means to put down any insurgency to remain in omnipotent control. Two of the main characters in the novels carry this attitude which causes deep human suffering and death. For the sake of human rights a society must do everything in its power to trace, cure and prevent such conducts. The discussion will also put forward how the physical setting, closed spaces, is used throughout the novels to create an atmosphere of oppression in order to heighten the exposedness of powerless people.
The big locked mental hospital is situated on the border to nature and civilisation which heightens the illusion of possible freedom. One of its wards is ruled with instinctive feeling by the antagonist and flat static character Big Nurse. That is what she is called by the first person narrator, patient Bromden, an unreliable but round and dynamic character. The more Big Nurse successfully manipulates her control of the ward, the more the hospital takes the form of a mechanical system in the narrator's description.
Big Nurse's initial position is always the manipulative gentle way. As long as everyone follows her unwritten laws, she smiles and speaks kindly to all. As soon as someone challenges her hidden authority by somehow not putting up with what is decided she slides unnoticed over to her suppression techniques which she daily refines during the various group meetings. She recaptures power by influencing the patients to feel shame of themselves and thus completely disarming them. This is the exposition of the story when the new admission, and inciting incident, McMurphy, the protagonist, shows up, a flat dynamic character and Big Nurse's greatest challenge of all times. However, Big Nurse will win the showdown because her need to be in power does not shun any means – she governs unrestricted and without limits.
From the inside of her office on the ward, a glass station, she gazes out over the patients' day room and supervises the patients' activities. It is to this office she retreats with her woven wicker bag in which she keeps the logbook with all the notes about the patients' behaviour: the nutritional supplements she needs to manifest and exercise power. It is here in the glass station she keeps the patients' confiscated cigarettes when they do not fulfil their household chores according to her orders. There are those packet of cigarettes McMurphy wants to reach when he breaks the glass pane the first time – and intensifies the action of the story. He smashes the window a second time out of anger because Big Nurse has given him suspension of leave. When she insinuates McMurphy is to be responsible for the death of two inmates he loses his temper and smashes the pane of glass a third time. They are one another's foil characters. Versus McMurphy's unchecked violent one-man rebellion Big Nurse demonstrates authority by displaying a calm dismissive attitude. She will not on any account give in.
Sometimes she needs to, however, open the door and step out in the world of the patients to hold meetings and tighten the thumbscrews – take notes, fill up her log book – if power is slipping out of her fingers. Her underlying basic principal on how to control the world she mainly uses the classical method of divide and rule. Initially Big Nurse softly rejects McMurphy's proposals about how he wants to change things at the ward. She explains her repudiation by saying she can not satisfy his selfish needs because the ward is for everyone. He accepts and responds to her declarations with humour and irony. Out of her sight and in front of the other inmates he is betting money that he can break her in a week.
After McMurphy has initiated his rebellion against Big Nurse's reign even the other patients take courage and start demanding change. Big Nurse becomes silent, sometimes smiling, sometimes she puts on a stone face and keeps the chatter among the inmates rolling. She is just biding her time. What McMurphy does not know yet is that he has issued her a challenge which she has accepted and she intends to make an example of him. The falling of the action starts when he finally understands his conditions of discharge; the more it dawns on him the more the ward – the coffin – closes on him. As his protests become more violent Big Nurse sees her chance to manifest her power further. She will make sure he gets locked up for life, it does not matter to what end, as a subdued patient or a vegetable.
At the large enclosed house in the countryside, far from heavy traffic and city lights it is Caliban who rules, as his prisoner Miranda calls him. Both are first person narrators – she extinguishes his initial unreliability by confirming his story – simultaneously antagonists and protagonists, flat and static characters. Caliban has meticulously created the interior of the house as a hierarchic mini universe of several levels. He dwells upstairs like a God and Miranda in the basement as his intended offspring. She is the subject in his human experiment in planting love feelings. He ascends to the mezzanine and invites her with meals and social gathering.
In these meetings he has a hope of winning her heart by providing for her what she is fond of, as music records, books and art magazines. She responds to his desire by alternately praying and demanding her freedom. He treats her pleadings by adapting and refining the house in believing that she will choose him in the end. The fall of the action starts when she rejects his marriage proposal and he finally says he will not let her go.
The climax of the story is when her struggle for freedom turns into physical violence. She tries to kill him with an ax. She tries to seduce him. She lets him take pornographic photographs of her. Nothing moves him. He resists all her attempts to soften him to open the door to freedom. He knows she would be lost forever. The chrysalis that should redeem her love becomes instead the coffin in which she finally fades away and dies - ironically in a cold infected by him.
Caliban and Big Nurse are characterised by a complete lack of empathy and emotions for others. They show through their narcissistic behaviour that they do not shun any means in nourishing and maintaining their positions with adamant laws like Old Testament Gods in their respective universes. Caliban and Big Nurse let people die in order to reign – the resolution of the stories – elevated over mankind.
Works Cited
Fowles, John. The Collector. London: Vintage, 1998. Print.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: A Novel. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books, 1976. Print.
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