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"Kesey's and OConnor's contrasting images of the human dilemma naturally produce contrasting modes of redemption. For Kesey, redemptive self-sacrifice is heroic, through the inspirational power of heroism to elicit imitation. For O'Connor, grace is primarily the experiencing of forgiveness, and the humbling of self is both its preparation and its effect, as is proper to a Thomistic understanding of grace."

Parables of Cosstly Grace: Flannery O'Connor and Ken Kesey
By George N. Boyd

WHILE twentieth-century literature may indeed know more of estrangement than of grace, it would be difficult to imagine two more explicit parables of redemption than Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest ¹ and Flannery O'Connor's short story, "The Artificial Nigger."² But the significance of these works goes beyond demonstrating the literary viability of the theme of redemption. These two stories, with their divergent views of the human condition, exemplify the contrasting conceptions of sin and grace represented by traditional (O'Connor) and radical (Kesey) theology-a contrast made clear by the capacity of literature to translate theological abstractions into the flesh of specific human experience.

The role of O'Connor's Catholic faith in her work is well known, and the large critical bibliography dealing with her work frequently focuses on that role, but the significance of "The Artificial Nigger" as the clearest statement of her literary theology has not been adequat-

George N. Boyd is Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. A graduate of Austin College, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary in New York, he has also taught at Colgate University. He teaches contemporary religious thought and religion in the arts. He also serves as a film reviewer for The Christian Century.
¹ Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (New York: The Viking Press, 1962). All references will be by page number in parenthesis within the body of the text.
² Flannery O'Connor "The ArtificialNigger" the Collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1953). All references will be by page number in parenthesis within the body of the text.

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ely appreciated. In contrast to the O'Connor bibliography, and despite Cuckoo's Nest's initial critical and public success, Ken Kesey's book has received extremely little attention in literary journals, and no articles concerned with it appear in The Index to Religious Periodical Literature. Also in contrast to O'Connor, Kesey would never be mistaken for a "Christian writer"; despite that and despite the critical eclipse his work has undergone, Cuckoo's Nest deserves to be recognized as the preeminent literary paradigm of redemption secularly conceived.

I

Although Cuckoo's Nest is not explicitly autobiographical, it may be that Kesey's own personality is the model for the hero (Randle McMurphy) and the setting (the mental asylum). McMurphy's role also prophetically anticipates a later stage of Kesey's life. Kesey has in fact received the most continuing attention, above all in Tom Wolfe's fascinating "non-fiction novel," The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,³ through his later role as an early hero of the psychedelic counter-culture. Wolfe's book takes Joachim Wach's model of how religious communities are founded as the interpretive key ⁴ through which he chronicles Kesey's charismatic, or better, messianic leadership of the "Merry Pranksters" and their role in the development of the California acid culture (1964-1966-the first Haight-Ashbury Summer was 1965). Some of Cuckoo's Nest, particularly Chief Broom's psychotic fantasies, were written while Kesey was on psychedelic "highs." These passages were composed in a veterans' hospital where Kesey worked as a night attendant in the psychiatric ward and where he was one of a group of volunteers for experimentation with little understood drugs which affected one's state of consciousness, including a then publicly-unknown drug called LSD.⁵ Unlike McMurphy's, Kesey's messianic career ended in failure, but anyone who has read Wolfe's book can never separate the personality of Kesey himself from that of Randle McMurphy.

The redemption in Kesey's story consists in the transformation of a group of mental asylum patients cowed by a tyrannical "Big Nurse" into men who begin to laugh, resist, and eventually try their own wings in launching themselves out of the oppressive security of the "Cuckoo's Nest." The agency of their liberation is the "contagious freedom"⁶ of McMurphy, a boisterous, profane, fun-loving Irishman who has feigned psychosis in order to trade a

³ Torn Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, Inc., 1968).
⁴ Ibid., p. 129.
⁵ Ibid., pp. 42-44, 49-51.
⁶ I am borrowing here the term used by Paul Van Buren to describe the redemptive quality of Jesus. See The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 133.

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six-month work farm sentence for what he has assumed to be the softer life of an asylum. Waging a hilarious guerilla campaign, McMurphy mocks, ignores, and evades the petty restrictions of Miss Ratched's authoritarian order. He unsettles her smooth rule and brings a spark of humor and hope to the men, but until his climactic self-sacrifice, he can ignite only feeble and sporadic imitation.

Superficially Cuckoo's Nest is a parable of resistance to a dehumanizing techno-bureaucratic society. As seen by the narrator, Chief Broom, the asylum is society in microcosm; Miss Ratched is the agent of the "Combine," the name for all institutions and powers which prefer to keep men docile and conformist. According to Harding, the most articulate of McMurphy's companions, the men are rabbits, although what puts them in the asylum is not the rabbithood they share with men generally, but rather their inability to "accommodate themselves to their rabbithood. "Cure" consists in "adjustment"-adjustment to the authoritarian conventions which are upheld by a firm if subtle compulsion aided by the individual's anxiety-rooted tendency toward conformity.

Perhaps the most demonic aspect of the adjustment process (and, by implication, also of the society for which the asylum is the factory for retooling misfitting parts) is the pseudo-democratic group meeting in which the patients are made the agents of their own emasculation. While theoretically they can establish many of their own rules (the TV hours, cigarette consumption, etc.), they are subject to various forms of administrative retribution if they resist the suggestions and preferences of those with power over them. In one incident, the men failed to support McMurphy's motion to adjust the TV hours during the World Series, and after they were shamed into support, the set was disconnected. Sporadically, McMurphy brings some substance into this formal but illusory democracy, but of course even this involves no choice concerning the basic direction of the institution.

II

Such an interpretation is accurate enough as far as it goes, but as long as McMurphy himself sees the contest only in this perspective, he is rather easily beaten. After his initial victory in momentarily breaking Miss Ratched's icy composure, he becomes a model patient. With some bitterness that his friends had not better informed him, he explains his reformed behavior as stemming from the discovery that his commitment is indefinite, rather than only for the remainder of his six-month prison term, and that discharge depends on the favor of the nurse. Realizing why they submit, he'll do the same, since he has as much to lose as any of them, but then McMurphy is shocked with the news that he has much more than they to lose. Most of the others are "voluntary" rather than "committed" and cannot be held without their

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consent. The problem is not merely the "combine"; it is, more deeply, their own lack of will. For once McMurphy is speechless, but the next day his resistance resumes, no longer as a game but as a struggle to the death which finally elicits a corresponding response from his fellow inmates .⁷

Again expressed in theological terminology, McMurphys "contagious freedom" is finally effective when he becomes quite literally "a man for others,"⁸ living out a voluntary mission of redemptive suffering. Kesey obviously intends McMurphy to be a secular Christ-figure. At the most explicit level of symbolism, McMurphys defiance leads him to a series of shock treatments on a table "shaped like a cross" (p. 67). McMurphy refused the customary sedation (pills instead of drugged wine-cf. Mark 15: 23), joked about their "annointing" his head with conductant, and requested a crown of thorns which he got in the form of a crown of sparks (pp. 267-270). Still not broken after repeated treatments but beginning to be threatened with a lobotomy, McMurphy's friends urge him to escape, but he insists on staying in order to give mother-dominated Billy his first experience of "Manhood." When they are caught the next morning because all the disciples and, in this case, the Messiah as well, had fallen asleep, he is betrayed by a disciple. Billy, unable to bear the nurse's threat to tell his mother, breaks down, puts all the blame on McMurphy, and then to complete his Judas role, cuts his own throat (pp. 302-304). The nurse charges McMurphy with playing with the lives of men "as if you thought yourself to be a god" (p. 304). Breaking the detailed passion parallel, McMurphy tears off her clothes and chokes her until subdued by attendants, but, at the end of the struggle, "he let himself cry out (cf. Matthew 27: 50; Mark 15: 37) "when he finally doesn't care anymore about anything but himself and his dying" (p. 305).

As with Jesus, McMurphys influence on his disciples is stronger in his absence than in his presence. Unless he goes away, his spirit of freedom will not come to be theirs as well (cf. John 16: 7), and they will remain dependent. Indeed they cannot think of him as absent-his "presence still tramping up and down the halls and laughing out loud in the meetings and singing in the latrines" (p. 307) precludes the nurse's attempt to re-establish the old era in the ward. In the following days, all but one of the non-committed patients leaves or transfers wards, and even the weak doctor,

⁷ Joseph J. Waldmeir, in nearly the only exception to the critical black-out confuses the structure of the story by missing this crucial transformation and gradual expansion of McMurphy's motivation. "Two Novelists of the Heller and Kesey," Contemporary Literature, V (Autumn, 1964), No. 3, 200.
⁸ This phrase, originating in Bonhoeffer's "Outline for a Book," probably comes closer than any other to representing a summary Christology among radical theologians. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Third Edition, edited by Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 210.

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the Pilate who in hand-washing fashion signs an the papers as the politically influential nurse bids him, becomes his own man. When the lobotomized McMurphy is brought back to the ward as a vegetable, his remaining disciples first deny that this body could be the real McMurphy; and then, in effect, they hide the body (cf. Matthew 28: 13) so that it cannot be displayed as a token of the effects of bucking the system. Chief Broom, the narrator of the story, a huge Indian who for years has feigned deafness and dumbness until McMurphy saw through him and restored him to human communication (for how could McMurphy be the Messiah if he didn't make the deaf hear and the dumb speak), suffocates McMurphy in his sleep. Chief Broom then flees the Cuckoo's Nest with the help of a companion who assists in bringing "to remembrance" (cf. John 14: 26) the things McMurphy had taught them ("He showed you how one time … You remember," p. 310). The Chiefs flight concludes the resurrection experiences, and Kesey's gospel ends.

III

With growing risk of interpretive excess, the Christ-figure details can be expanded indefinitely. In analogy with Jesus (cf. John 6: 16-21), the high point in McMurphy's career is marked by his wheedling permission to take twelve of them on a day's fishing excursion; at least one fish is almost too heavy to bring into the boat; the weather worsens but narrowly they get safely back. Yet immediately afterwards (cf. John 6: 66), the disciples (in this case including the twelve) begin to fall away, yielding to the nurse's suggestion that McMurphy is only staying around for the money he wins off them in various and slightly deceptive gambling schemes. Joseph Waldmeir, who otherwise notes only the most explicit Christ symbolism (the electro-therapy sequence), suggests that the Chief in strangling McMurphy represents McMurphy's priest offering and partaking of the sacrifice of the already dead victor-victim in order to be renewed by his life.⁹

Whatever the reason for the detailed Christ-figure, Cuckoo's Nest is not deliberately a parable for secular Christianity, certainly not in the sense of being an illustration of anyone's theological viewpoint. At the time of its publication in 1962, the death-of-God theology was merely in its late gestation stage. Tom Wolfe's account of Kesey's role as prophet-messiah of the Merry Pranksters quotes Kesey as saying that despite the Pranksters' increasingly religious interpretation of their psychedelic life, it is not the "Christ-trip . . . that's been done . . . and then you have 2000 years of war."¹⁰ Nevertheless, McMurphy is a model of a "contagiously free" "Man for others." As Chief Broom realizes:

⁹ Waldmeir, op. cit., p. 203.
¹⁰ Wolfe, op. cit., p. 193.

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It was us that had been making him go on for weeks, keeping him standing long after his feet and legs had given out, weeks of making him wink and grin and laugh and go on with his act long after his humor had been parched dry between two electrodes (pp. 304-305).

Though McMurphy wants to free himself to live on his own terms (cf. Mark 14: 36), he cannot since "he had signed on for the whole game" (p. 296).

Yet "man for others" is a terribly inadequate summary phrase for McMurphy and an equally unfortunate one for Jesus as well. In each case one has the story of a man who is faithful to his own sense of identity and who insists on maintaining it at whatever cost. Both intend their lifestyles as models of authentic humanity for their friends; they even sacrifice themselves to that sense of mission; and the desire not to betray those others reinforces their determination in the face of temptation to find an easy way out. However, none of this alters their fundamental commitments to be whatever they understood, themselves to be. In a description of McMurphy's motivation which can be applied to Jesus as well, Waldmeir says that for Billy's death to be meaningful "McMurphy must win, must be free, must live; but in order to win he must lose, in order to be free he must bind himself inextricably, in order to live be must be destroyed. The only alternative is to desert the struggle."¹¹

Both McMurphy and Jesus conform to the expectations of their friends as little as they do to those of the authorities, and they remain self-centered enough to make a few somewhat deceptive gambling dollars or accept the costly ointment which could buy food for the poor. A man who is only "for others" would be so devoid of human personality that his sacrifice of "self" would be empty and his presence boring; surely Erich Fromm is right that one who does not love himself cannot genuinely love others. Bonhoeffer himself was aware of this. In his letter of May 6, 1944, he promised that "I shall be writing next time about Christians' 'egotism' (selfless self-love). . . . Too much altruism is oppressive."¹² Unfortunately the promise was forgotten, and this passage has not qualified the excesses in the usage of "the man for others" phrase.

There is, of course, no once-for-all atonement in McMurphy's struggle: " . . . the thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out any more and somebody else had to take your place (p. 303). What Kesey has given us is an affirmation of spontaneity, love, life, and freedom over against conformity, docility, and death. He offers the declaration that although such a style may have a cross as its price tag, crosses can be redemptive and resurrection

¹¹ Waldmeir, op. cit., p. 202.
¹² Bonhoeffer, op. cit., pp. 157-158 (Letter of May 6, 1944).

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may have the last word. McMurphy is resurrected in the lives of his disciples. Of course, this does not eliminate the personal loss for the man who relishes the life he surrenders to those who secretly hate life, nor the public loss of the good incarnate wherever life is lived with such relish.

IV

Flannery O'Connor's short story concerns a backwoods Georgian, Mr. Head, left with responsibility for raising his grandson, Nelson. Mr. Head, a stubborn, proud, and self-sufficient man, is irked by his grandson's sense of independence and even superiority, which is often expressed by the boy's boast of having been born in Atlanta, although he left too young to remember it. Determined to teach Nelson that being from Atlanta is not so great (the city's major fault is that it is "full of niggers"), Mr. Head takes Nelson for a days visit. Lost and humiliated in "niggertown" and later still lost in a white section, Mr. Head is no less determined to teach the boy a lesson about his dependence. He hides while the boy naps momentarily. When the boy awakens alone, be panics and races away, knocking over a lady who screams that her ankle is broken, calls for the police, and tells Mr. Head he'll have to pay her expenses. While Nelson clings to his grandfathers waist, Mr. Head denies ever having seen the boy and walks away, leaving the bystanders so repulsed by a man who could "deny his own image and likeness" that they cannot touch him (p. 123).

As Mr. Head walks on, he contemplates the misery of his future, living with those accusing eyes which seem intent on "preserving his treachery intact to present it at the final judgment" (p. 125). He realizes that only his death will give him relief. Hopelessly lost and utterly miserable in their own separate ways the attention of both is captured by the bent and chipped plaster figure. The statue had originally represented a Negro boy happily eating watermelon, but now it had a wild, agonized appearance. Staring at the grotesque figure "as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat" (p. 128), Mr. Head suddenly knows "what mercy felt like" (until now "he had been too good to deserve any"). Feeling the need to say something to show that he is still wise, and sensing the boy's desire for assurance, he "opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, 'They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one'" (p. 128). Arriving home and feeling the action of mercy touch him again,

he understood that it grew out of agony which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker, and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God while the

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action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before, but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair…. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter paradise (pp. 128, 129).

V

Although "The Artificial Nigger" has never received primary attention from the critics, it was Flannery O'Connor's own favorite among her short stories.¹³ That may be partly because it is such a poignant story of quite ordinary, though culturally backward, people, for she resented her work being summarized as always concerned with the grotesque or as another example of the fiction of Southern degeneracy.¹⁴ Her attitude was probably also due to this storys detailed statement of the faith and the sense of responsibility to that faith as a writer which underlies all her work. Here her frequently negative witness yields to an affirmative one, and grace is experienced without horror or death as its instrument.

The story is a perfect picture of an essentially self-righteous man, confident of his will and character, who through his denial of the boy comes to realize that his innocence is a delusion reinforced mainly by his lack of opportunity. Nothing human, however monstrous, is foreign to him given proper circumstances. How the plaster Negro boy mediates reconciliation is not so clear, however, and that is probably the way O'Connor wanted it. The unexpected confrontation with mystery and its function as the agency of grace correspond in her work to grace itself, the mysterious transformation of cynicism, pride, or despair. All that is clearly said is that their common agony is the bond between the plaster Negro and the two viewers. Surely the statue's being a Negro is part of the secret. The bedrock of Mr. Head's identity had been his superiority at least to blacks; yet all through the day he is put down by them. Showing the boy the dining car, he scoffs at those who have to eat behind ropes, but not being able to afford to eat there himself, the black dining car porter dismisses him like a man shooing flies (p. 112). Lost in town, he is ridiculed by a black woman from whom Nelson asks directions, but confronting the equally agonized look of the plaster Negro he is caught in a universal human fellowship of misery.¹⁵ By recognizing his identity

¹³ Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, OSF, "Flannery O'Connor, A Realist of Distance," The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), p. 159.
¹⁴ Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and His Country," in The Living Novel, A Symposium, edited by Granville Hicks, excerpted in Lewis A. Lawson's "A Collection of Statements," see Friedman and Lawson, eds., op, cit., p. 242.
¹⁵ That Negroes are sometimes images of fraternity in O'Connor's fiction was noted by Stanley Edgar Hyman, Flannery O'Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 42, but he does not clearly identify this as an instance.

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with those he thinks contemptible, he can recognize himself for what he really is.

Beyond its fraternal significance, the "artificial nigger" is an image of Christ crucified.¹⁶ Certainly it functions in the same way as Christianity has understood the cross, for it symbolizes (or rather conveys) at the same time both judgment and mercy. In the symbolism of the story, the setting of circular drives is Dante's ninth circle of hell, and the statue stands in Satan's place in the center.¹⁷ But the agonized statue is the monument to "another's victory" (Christ the victor-victim); its look of agony is not Satan's look of pure malice. In O'Connor's faith it is ultimately grace, not judgment, which has the final word. Christ has conquered Satan's domain, and the means of realizing one's "true depravity" is not the vision of evil but the vision of the crucified, and it is that drama which Mr. Head has reenacted in the betrayal of the boy. Nelson is of course as much in need of reconciliation as Mr. Head, and his hatred is dissolved into forgiveness by the same vision. To whatever degree it remains mysterious how the statue conveys mercy, that is an appropriate parallel to the mystery of how one more broken Jew has had similar effect on some men.

VI

The contrasting portraits of the condition from which one is redeemed in these two parables corresponds to traditional and radical theological emphases. O'Connor once referred to this collection as "nine stories about original sin,"¹⁸ and Mr. Head's root sin is overwhelming pride. Every event of the day is directly the result either of his trying to prove his superiority or of his unwillingness to admit a mistake or express dependency by asking for help. In Kesey's novel, the primary problem is the apathy (or sloth) within the inmates. The subtle totalitarianism of the "principalities and powers" which inflict the men's suffering is made possible by the same weak

¹⁶ This was recognized by Ruth M. Vande Kieft, "Judgment in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor," The Sewanee Review, LXXVI (Spring, 1968), No. 2, 353.
¹⁷ In the most detailed study of this story, Peter L. Hays has convincingly unpacked the details of O'Connor's parallel of the journey to Atlanta with Dante's tour of Hell, even to the point of showing how the locale is the ninth circle, "the frozen pit in the depths of Hell in which the betrayers [Mr. Head's crime] are frozen in concentric circles around Satan. 'The big white houses were like partially submerged icebergs in the distance. There were no sidewalks, only drives, and these wound around and around in endless ridiculous circles' (p. 126). And Nelson is still unforgiving, for 'his mind had frozen around his grandfather's treachery . . . ' (p. 125), just as frozen in the very center of Cocytus is three-headed Satan, ripping in his central mouth Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Christ." Hays concludes that the statue in the midst of the circles must be Satan, but that is a triumph of the logic of the image which makes nonsense of the story, mainly because of not understanding the theological considerations alluded to in our text above. Peter L. Hays, "Dante, Tobit, and 'The Artificial Nigger,"' Studies in Short Fiction, V (Spring, 1968), No. 3, 266.
¹⁸ Quoted from a letter to the Fitzgeralds, to whom the collection was dedicated, by Caroline Gordon, "Heresy in Dixie," The Sewanee Review, LXXVI (Spring, 1968), No. 2, 264.

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ness which drove them within the asylum for security. Harding's cynical rationalization was wrong-the failure is after all in their being rabbits, not in their inability to accommodate to rabbithood. Their root sin is, as Harvey Cox put it, to allow the serpent to make their decisions for them.¹⁹

Kesey's and O'Connor's contrasting images of the human dilemma naturally produce contrasting modes of redemption. For Kesey, redemptive self-sacrifice is heroic, through the inspirational power of heroism to elicit imitation. For O'Connor, grace is primarily the experiencing of forgiveness, and the humbling of self is both its preparation and its effect, as is proper to a Thomistic understanding of grace. Apart from any human heroism, forgiving love seeks its recipients and seeps through when pride's defenses are shaken. Subjectively, of course, recognition of guilt opens Mr. Head to the acid of grace. Miss O'Connor once noted that in her short stories "the devil accomplishes a good deal of ground work before grace can be effective."²⁰ Still, Mr. Heads full acknowledgment of his depravity and justification follows his experiencing of mercy. The story expresses O'Connor's concern for safeguarding both freedom of the will and the mystery of grace.

The two views of man are also distinguished by the kind of moral dualism which permeates Kesey's book. Despite Kesey's diagnosis of sloth or weakness as the root problem, there is a division of the world into good and evil, oppressed and oppressors, and all hope for redemption, even all human compassion, is directed exclusively toward the oppressed. While the radical theologians are usually too much the children of Christian tradition to take such a stance, such dualism is very much present, especially in the rhetoric of revolution, in the contemporary secularity they have baptized.²¹ For Kesey, as he put it in his Prankster period, "You're either on the bus or off the bus."²² Or, to paraphrase in the terminology of the exclusivist side of Christian tradition-extra omnibus nulla salus. For O'Connor, men are united in worth and in guilt; neither the dismissal of the humanity of the oppressors nor the denial of guilt to the victims is possible. Each person, even her most chillingly grotesque characters (for example, the murdering "Misfit", in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"), is "always valuable and always responsible,"²³ and thus the object both of mercy and judgment.

¹⁹ Harvey Cox, On Not Leaving It to the Snake (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. xiv.
²⁰ Flannery O'Connor, "The Novelist and Free Will," Fresco, Winter, 1963, excerpted in Lewis A. Lawson's "A Collection of Statements," see Friedman and Lawson, eds., op. cit., p. 229.
²¹ For example, Paul Kanter's song, "We Can Be Together," in the Jefferson Airplane's album Volunteers.
²² Wolfe, op. cit., p. 83.
²³ Quoted by Betsy Lockridge, "An Afternoon with Flannery O'Connor," Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Nov. 1, 1959, excerpted in Lewis A. Lawson's "A Collection of Statements,' see Friedman and Lawson, eds., op. cit., p. 229.

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VII

Yet however one chooses to orient his own value judgments among these distinctions, both stories are powerful and convincing. Perhaps that should be a clue that our contrasts are not to be taken with ultimate seriousness. Precisely because the stories are concrete fragments of human experience, their particularity must be respected. The style and content of redemption need not to be the same in two radically different situations. Without admitting any supernatural superstructure, Kesey need not deny the kind of transcendence forgiveness always involves, since forgiveness is "despite" rather than "because of" our estimates of responsibility. Indeed, be presupposes such transcendence of self in McMurphys own acceptance of the self-sacrificing mission. His friends' transformation can, but his cannot, be accounted for as the influence of heroic example. Far from denying the redemptive effect of self-sacrificing love, Kesey celebrates it as a continuing reality, incarnate wherever a man takes up his own cross. Neither could O'Connor deny the "exemplary' efficacy of "heroic" fidelity and love without giving up both her churchs Christ and its tradition of martyrs. The unforgettable McMurphy with his humor, independence, and love of life is deliberately closer to such a tradition than to the "wasteland" characters of much twentieth-century fiction.

With regard to their views of man and his plight, Kesey's focus on apathy as a possible occupant of the role of root sin need not exclude pride's playing that role for other men, as Harvey Cox would agree.²⁴ On the other side, the Christian tradition O'Connor represents has often seen weakness of spirit as part of the basis and nearly always as part of the effect of original sin. Whether the result of experiencing inspiration or forgiveness, the fruit of redemption is liberation from the bondage of one's past and freedom to face the future without shackles. Moreover, beyond the legitimate distinctions in substance as well as emphasis, in both stories redemption comes through ordinary experience (Mr. Head is dealing with a young boy and a chipped statue, not a Bible text, a prayer, or a vision), and when it is authentic it means a real and painful transformation-in some sense, death and rebirth of the self. Both Kesey and O'Connor know a human and a costly grace.

²⁴ COX, op. cit., pp. xiii-xvi.