SOURCE: Drout, Michael D. C. “Hoisting the Arm of Defiance: Beowulfian Elements in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.” Western American Literature 28, no. 2 (August 1993): 131-41.

In the following essay, Drout investigates the thematic and stylistic relationships between Sometimes a Great Notion and the medieval epic Beowulf, interpreting the former as a representation of a contemporary heroic archetype rather than an existentialist “absurd quest.”

Although Ken Kesey is possessed of a modern sensibility and is strongly influenced by the philosophy of existentialism, he fashions Hank Stamper, the protagonist of Sometimes a Great Notion, in the image of archetypes out of the dim mythic past of the Beowulf poet. Hank is the dominating, triumphant hero of the Germanic past, Americanized and brought into the modern age. Like Beowulf, he exemplifies a type of courage that can rise above entropy and even death. Though Kesey does not deny that the powers...