(Don't pray for a snow day - it's going to rain and melt away tonight).
Most of these quotes come from discussions in class.
Part I. Quote ID
Part II. Passage Analysis
Part III. Short Essay
A couple hints to think about for the Short Essay:
Did you know?
TIME magazine listed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as on of the top 100 novels since the magazine began in 1923.
See the list!
How many have you read?
How many of these books do you want to read?
What does TIME's critics say about Kesey's novel?
Did you know?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest has also had its fair share of controversy:
From Wikipedia:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of America's most highly challenged and banned novels.
1974: Five residents of Strongsville, Ohio sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. They deemed the book "pornographic" and said that it "glorifies criminal activity, has a tendency to corrupt juveniles, and contains descriptions of beastiality, bizarre violence, and torture, dismemberment, death, and human elimination".
1975: The book was removed from public schools in Randolph, New York and Alton, Oklahoma
1977: Removed from the required reading list in Westport, Maine
1978: Banned from the St. Anthony, Idaho Freemont High School and the teacher who assigned the novel was fired
1982: Challenged at Merrimack, New Hampshire High School
1986: Challenged at Aberdeen Washington High school in Honors English classes. The local Board of Education votes to keep it for the "promotion of secular humanism".
2000: Challenged at Placentia Yorba Linda, California Unified School District. Parents say that the teachers could "choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again".[14][15]
1975: The book was removed from public schools in Randolph, New York and Alton, Oklahoma
1977: Removed from the required reading list in Westport, Maine
1978: Banned from the St. Anthony, Idaho Freemont High School and the teacher who assigned the novel was fired
1982: Challenged at Merrimack, New Hampshire High School
1986: Challenged at Aberdeen Washington High school in Honors English classes. The local Board of Education votes to keep it for the "promotion of secular humanism".
2000: Challenged at Placentia Yorba Linda, California Unified School District. Parents say that the teachers could "choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again".[14][15]
Guess who is ranked 29th on this list?
"Best Banned and/or Censored Books (or Worst to Have Banned)"
Here's a cool Prezi about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with thoughts on why it shouldn't be banned:
For the short essay, you will have to make an argument - either "for" or "against" - reading Kesey's controversial novel in freshman English at EA.
Here's a few quotes to consider for the test... from the text (Search online):
Quote ID's (There will be 10 - know the speaker and audience):
"I had so many insults I died. I was born dead. I can’t
help it. I’m tired. I’m give out trying. You got chances. I had so many insults I was born dead. You
got it easy. I was born dead an’ life was hard. I’m tired. I’m tired out talking and standing up. I been
dead fifty-five years."
“She walks like beauty, in the night.”
“Oh, is that it? Is that it, huh? You gonna crucify
old Seef just as if he was doing it to spite you or something?”
“These things are Thorne Smithian daydreams!”
“Sweetheart, you still have scads of time for things like that. Your whole life is ahead of you.”
“He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.”
“It isn’t happening. It’s all a collaboration of Kafka and Mark Twain and Martini.”
“Listen—you don’t think any of us are being taken in by this crap, do you? It’s bad, but we know where the blame lies—we ain’t blaming you.”
“First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!”
“Lady, I think you’re full of so much ___________. ”
"Nothing like him."
"What worries me, [...]is how your poor mother is going to take this"
"I've took their best punch."
"I haven't heard a real laugh since since I came through that door, do you know that? Man, when you lose your laugh, you lose your footing."
"Hooee those Chinese Commies could have learned a few things from you, lady."
"You're no damned rabbit!"
“EeeeaaooOOOoommm. ... Air to ground, air to ground: missile sighted; coming into my sights
now."
Quote Analysis (Select 5 of 7)
1.
“Hell’s bells, Harding!” McMurphy yells suddenly. “I don’t know what to think! What do you
want out of me? A marriage counsellor? All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it
looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down. I know what you
want me to think; you want me to feel sorry for you, to think she’s a real bitch. Well, you
didn’t make her feel like any queen either. Well, screw you and ‘what do you think?’ I’ve got worries
of my own without getting hooked with yours. So just quit!” He glares around the library at the
other patients. “Alla you! Quit bugging me, goddammit!”
2.
I watch the car pull up the hill and stop down a piece from our yard, and the dust keeps
coming, crashing into the rear of it and busting in every direction and finally settling on the sage and
soapweed round about and making it look like chunks of red, smoking wreckage. The car sits there
while the dust settles, shimmering in the sun. I know it isn’t tourists with cameras because they
never drive this close to the village. If they want to buy fish they buy them back at the highway; they
don’t come to the village because they probably think we still scalp people and burn them around a
post. They don’t know some of our people are lawyers in Portland, probably wouldn’t believe it if I
told them. In fact, one of my uncles became a real lawyer and Papa says he did it purely to prove he
could, when he’d rather poke salmon in the fall than anything. Papa says if you don’t watch it people
will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being
mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.
3.
It started slow and pumped itself full, swelling the men bigger and bigger. I watched, part of
them, laughing with them—and somehow not with them. I was off the boat, blown up off the water
and skating the wind with those black birds, high above myself, and I could look down and see
myself and the rest of the guys, see the boat rocking there in the middle of those diving birds, see
McMurphy surrounded by his dozen people, and watch them, us, swinging a laughter that rang out
on the water in ever-widening circles, farther and farther, until it crashed up on beaches all over the
coast, on beaches all over all coasts, in wave after wave after wave.
4.
“No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked
pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you? No? You must burry on? Ah,
he’s gone. Pity.[...] Never before did I realize that mental illness could have
the aspect of power, power. Think of it: perhaps the more insane a man is, the more powerful he
could become. Hitler an example. Fair makes the old brain reel, doesn’t it? Food for thought there.”
5.
“Please understand: We do not impose certain rules and restrictions on you without a great deal
of thought about their therapeutic value. A good many of you are in here because you could not
adjust to the rules of society in the Outside World, because you refused to face up to them, because
you tried to circumvent them and avoid them. At some time—perhaps in your childhood—you may
have been allowed to get away with flouting the rules of society. When you broke a rule you knew it.
You wanted to be dealt with, needed it, but the punishment did not come. That foolish lenience on
the part of your parents may have been the germ that grew into your present illness. I tell you this
hoping you will understand that it is entirely for your own good that we enforce discipline and order.”
6.
And suddenly nobody’s hooting at him any more. His arms commence to swell, and the veins
squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift.
But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.
Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.
And suddenly nobody’s hooting at him any more. His arms commence to swell, and the veins
squeeze up to the surface. He clinches his eyes, and his lips draw away from his teeth. His head leans back, and tendons stand out like coiled ropes running from his heaving neck down both arms to his hands. His whole body shakes with the strain as he tries to lift something he knows he can’t lift, something everybody knows he can’t lift.
But, for just a second, when we hear the cement grind at our feet, we think, by golly, he might do it.
Then his breath explodes out of him, and he falls back limp against the wall. There’s blood on the levers where he tore his hands. He pants for a minute against the wall with his eyes shut. There’s no sound but his scraping breath; nobody’s saying a thing.
7.
There had been times when I’d wandered around in a daze for as long as two weeks after a shock
treatment, living in that foggy, jumbled blur which is a whole lot like the ragged edge of sleep, that
gray zone between light and dark, or between sleeping and waking or living and dying, where you
know you’re not unconscious any more but don’t know yet what day it is or who you are or what’s
the use of coming back at all—for two weeks. If you don’t have a reason to wake up you can loaf
around in that gray zone for a long, fuzzy time, or if you want to bad enough I found you can come
fighting right out of it. This time I came fighting out of it in less than a day, less time than ever.
And here's more just for fun:
"Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing." Ken Kesey
Making a test for Cuckoo's Nest. So many quotables http://t.co/IaImX75gne
— Kevin James O'Brien (@KOB14) December 7, 2013
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