One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is interesting for the way it can announce but not quite, not yet, actually embody a condition of pure expressivity. Instead it presents us with an unusual fusion or palimpsest of silence and speech: Bromden’s wordlessness amidst the events he describes in the present tense remains palpable even as it is being systematically negated in the (extradiegetic) telling. No wonder that the narrative, as it unfolds, is really nothing like the onrushing rant Bromden tells us to expect. Rather, it reads like what we would expect from someone Gordon Lish would defend as a
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