In his critical study,
Ken Kesey, Stephen L. Tanner noted the two-fold tugs of Kesey's life: "Ken Kesey's career as a writer can best be understood in relation to two geographical locations: western Oregon and the San Francisco Bay area. These are the centers for the important shaping influences of his life." Tanner goes on to describe the tension in Kesey's fiction as the push and pull between these two poles, "between country and city...between family roots and individual discovery; between traditional Christian values and those of a new counterculture; between respectability and outlawry; between old ways and rural life and day-glo paint and amplified rock music; and between the straight and drug cultures."
These tensions are clearly present in Kesey's two major works, and are in place also in recent fiction, including Sailor Song, his first novel after a nearly three-decade hiatus. Central to Kesey's work is the individual who stands up to the forces of a mechanized, soulless, authoritarian world, whether it be Randle Patrick McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest battling the metaphorical powers of the "Combine" as personified in Nurse Ratched, or Hank Stamper fighting a losing battle against the union which wants to organize all independent loggers in Sometimes a Great Notion.
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