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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Comparison Essay

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I believe it is human nature to hope for the best in future situations and to always embellish our memories of the past. I think that this is our way of coping with the present. If we can convince ourselves that things were better at one point and therefore will be better at some point, then the present never seems too awful. This being said, it came as a surprise to me that such a fundamental mannerism of humans drove me so near insane.
Novel after novel, I found that the characters who I actively despised were the ones who pretended that their lives were always perfect in order to escape the present. Take Blanche DuBois, from A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. At one point in the play, Blanche cries, “I don’t want realism. I want magic!” and pardon my informality, but I HATED her for saying so. If only she had faced reality for one measly minute, she would have been able to see that the only way to fix her situation was to fight her plagued present. If …show more content…
I realized that these few were instead centered on mental illness. Take, for example, my selections from Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Although this didn’t surprise me (because I find the human mind very intriguing), it did frustrate me a bit. Why couldn’t I have chosen pieces that distinctly stick to one theme? Then, it dawned on me. These alleged outcasts fit perfectly into my theme; I was only being too ignorant to remember what my previous anthologies had taught me. Sometimes, the insane are more in check with reality than the sane. Oftentimes, they are only termed insane because they understand the world and its problems too well and so struggle to cope. For example, many called Edgar Allan Poe insane. However, I would like to believe that his grasp on reality was just a bit too tight. His quotes speak more clearly to me than those of many sane writers

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