SOURCE: Safer, Elaine B. “The Absurd Quest and Black Humor in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.” Critique 24, no. 4 (summer 1983): 228-40.

In the following essay, Safer delineates the absurdist perspective and black humor tone of Sometimes a Great Notion.

Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) has been acclaimed as a premier example of black humor literature, while Sometimes a Great Notion (1963) has received relatively little critical attention, most of it negative. Commentators have faulted Kesey's second novel for having “quirky and hallucinatory” images, characters who engage in a “self-defeating struggle,” and—in general—for being too diffuse, for having no central unity.¹ An absurdist thrust and black humor tone, similar to those in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, give coherence and compelling power to Kesey's long second work and cause Sometimes a Great Notion to be a major contribution to contemporary American literature.

The story...