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The Taboo Of Silence

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The metaphor of life as a tapestry in strands and collections of a unique handcrafted piece can be found to be disrupted in all three texts due to the presence of religion and mental illness. Within Kesey’s ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1962) it is the dominant imagery of the ‘combine’ which causes the reader to question what is sanity and the process in which people with mental illness are ‘cured’ in order for them to ‘take responsibility’ and become active members of society. Highlighted in the ‘breakdown of the taboo of silence’ surrounding mental illness seen in the Community Mental illness Centers Act of 1963 which called for more community services instead of institutionalisation. Similarly in Plath’s ‘Ariel’ (1966) collection it is the brutality of the reoccurring ‘Holocaust metaphor’ and pastiche to confessional poets such Anne Sexton that asserts the argument of both faith and mental illness being a personal relationship with the self and effectively a struggle with identity, effecting relationships with others which is expressed both in Plath’s own poetry such as ‘The Applicant’ and in Ted Hughes ‘Birthday Letters’ in poems such as ‘Fever’ . Within McEwan’s ‘Enduring Love’ (1997) it is the overarching motif, drawn from the secular society of the 90s, being both unrequited and ‘enduring’, that presents the destructive nature of both mental illness and religion, paired together in the embodiment of Jed Parry and by the intertextuality of the novel which offers an argument that

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