"The guys complained and kidded and joked about it, trying not to look at one another or those floating slate masks working down the line behind the tubs, like nightmare faces in negative, sighting down soft, squeezy nightmare gunbarrels (Kesey 258)."
As soon as I came across this passage in the novel, I admired it. The writing style which author Ken Kesey practices in this passage craftily invokes a feeling of detailed discomfort. It is evident that Kesey picked his words and description carefully as to signal a certain emotional shift in the novel. By looking at the literary elements of the passage, one could easily infer the speaker's nightmarish feelings about the situation.
To briefly summarize the preceding events leading up to this passage, the orderlies in the hospital had grouped all of the patients who went on the fishing trip for a "special shower" ordered by the Head Nurse. Once grouped together, the patients are grotesquely disinfected everywhere by these black orderlies holding tubes of salve. This event, even in summary, appears as extremely uncomfortable to the reader. If one were to take a closer look at the text, one would notice that it only seems worse.
Kesey measures his diction in this passage carefully and precisely. The use of alliteration is so omnipresent throughout this passage that it's almost ridiculous. The first occurrence of alliteration would be the hard "c/k" sound in "complained and kidded and joked". The next two that occur repeat the "n" sound and the "s" sound, with "nightmare faces in negative" and "sighting down soft, squeezy . . ." The effect this has on the text is to sort of paint a picture of the uncomfortable, nightmarish situation that the speaker is witnessing. If one were to imagine a man with a face as blank as slate approaching him or her in the shower with a tube of salve, one would immediately want to throw that image out of his or her mind as fast as it came. Kesey also imparts the reality of the situation on the reader through the use of metaphor and simile. The speaker, through Kesey, calls the faces of the orderlies "floating slate masks" and compares them to the "nightmare faces in negative, sighting down soft, squeezy nightmare gunbarrels." As previously stated, this technique is used to paint this nightmarish picture for the reader.
As far as syntax goes, this is all broken to the reader in one, well-crafted sentence. There is a possibility that Kesey did this intentionally as to reveal how much horrifying understanding the speaker had of this situation. However, Kesey may have also crafted the passage this way as to show how fast things were moving in procedure. One could only infer, but if I had to come to a conclusion, I would say that Kesey made this powerful passage a singular sentence to convey the speed at which this reality passed. Just like when most people are faced with some terrible situation, it either passes by in pain-staking detail or so fast they don't truly realize what's going on at first. The latter is the mindset the speaker seems to use, as crafted by the author.
This passage is probably one of the most powerful and descriptive in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I respect Kesey for portraying it this way. Expertly-crafted dialogue such as this must take a lot of thought power to develop, keeping in mind that this is still all one sentence. Through the stylistic devices, syntax, and diction, the reader is able to feel just as uncomfortable as the speaker in the novel, which is quite a beautiful art for great authors.
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