Straight Into the Deep-End

50 - something pages and literally only the basic level groundwork has been laid for this story. If I had to summarize in one word it’d be “beginning”, that’s it. Let me break this down before I and inevitably the person who’s reading this feels inherently lost when it comes to this book. Ken Kesey starts this book out by jumping headfirst into a day-in-the-life vlog through the view of Chief Bromson, a half-Native American State Champion football player who pretends to be deaf and dumb to make his life significantly easier in the ward. Oh yeah, I should probably tell you where the hell this is all happening. A women known as the Big Nurse (her name is technically Nurse Ratched but when you’re not a good person you normally don’t get the respect of being called by your actual title), runs our favorite little mental hospital. And let me tell you this lady is absolutely tyrannical, she keeps the place running like a well oiled machine but will do anything to keep it running that way. On the literal first day we are introduced to this sorry excuse for a hospital, she forces a dude to take their meds anally. Like the lady her “aids” (literally just some strong dudes that she found) grab the poor guy, put him on a bed and keep him there while Ratched did the dirty work. I will applaud Kesey for how he introduced this book, this story takes place in a mental hospital, going off of the assumption that almost everyone in there is already on something, this super untraceable start to the book kinda knocks off any idea of what kind of structure that we would be seeing. Most book introduce characters by slowly packing them in but Kesey points a t-shirt cannon at your chest and says “good luck!” I will say the one dude that stood out was a transfer patient named Patrick McMurphy, the amount of swag that this guy has to have to tell off Big Nurse is absolutely insane I honestly can’t wait for the amount of bs that this dude is about to pull.