Assignment Overview
Directions—provocation:
Because writing is integral to thinking (and to reading), and because learning how to raise
thoughtful, substantive questions is important, you will be responsible for constructing a
written response. You instead, is to create debatable, generative questions that will help
propel our discussion and produce argument. You should create interrelation discussion
questions (three to four). Your provocation needn’t be long (350-400 words is ideal), but it
must absolutely feature questions that generate thought and debate. Focus on key ideas and
point to relevant passages that struck you while you read. You should narrow the focus (or
scope) of your questions to a specific body of evidence (a passage, a claim, a hidden motif).
See (and follow) my sample below. Sample Provocation:
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told from the perspective of Chief Bromden, a
patient who suffers from severe hallucinations and anxiety. Chief Bromden’s story includes
hallucinations such as the fog and the Combine, his explanation for the mechanical nature of
the ward and that of society. At one point in his childhood, Chief Bromden recalled that his
father was “real big,” but “the combine worked on him for years” and eventually made him
smaller (188). Moreover, Chief Bromden believes that the ward, itself, “is a factory for the
combine,” and even “the nurse is […] a high-ranking official for them” (36, 164). Chief
Bromden insists that everybody is affected by the Combine and the Big Nurse’s tyranny; he,
therefore, visualizes himself slipping into a fog, where he can “feel safe” (112). Soon enough,
however, Chief Bromden realizes that “the Combine didn’t get [McMurphy],” showing that
McMurphy is not like the rest of the patients in the ward. In fact, McMurphy is so different
from the rest of the patients that oftentimes McMurphy even tries “to drag [everyone else]
out of the fog, out in the open where [they]’d be easy to get at” (112). Why is McMurphy
resilient against the Combine if even ordinary people like Chief Bromden’s father eventually
succumbed to it? Additionally, does McMurphy consciously help the patients gain selfconfidence and fight Nurse Ratched’s/the Combine’s sense of mechanical order or does he
do so involuntarily? Does McMurphy pull the other patients out of the fog only out of his
own magnanimity? Finally, why do you think Kesey chooses to have Bromden narrate the
story?