The bus trip proved more than either school was ready to handle, eventuallly ending in a chaotic array of abandonment. In One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest, Kesey showed the liberation of a psychiatric patient from a mental institution. In Sometimes A Great Notion, the tragic struggle of a union worker's movement against the ever- growing power of corporate bosses, and one man's expression of freedom against both these forces. With his bus trip, he wrote a novel for a generation through the voice of experience, and carried his voice into memory. For Kesey, the real American was not to be found in the motifs of illusion, given expression by the turning of the knob of television; the new mind-numbing drug for a new age. It was to be found with-in the band of outcasts and drifters crossing across lost western plains. There lay the real Daniel Boones, Abraham Lincolns, or Thomas Jeffersons; far away from the hallowed halls of the university. To this author, they encompassed the true traditional mythology of illusion. And, they were to be found in the countryside of America.
