Novel: Sometimes a Great Notion

Overview
Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion follows the defiant Stamper clan, independent loggers on Oregon’s wet, tidal Siletz River, who refuse to join a community-wide strike. The family motto, “Never give an inch,” drives them to carry on cutting and rafting timber while the rest of Wakonda turns hostile. The novel interweaves a saga of labor conflict with a knotted family drama, told in shifting voices that capture the roar of saws, the pull of tides, and the stubborn currents of pride and love.

Setting and Premise
Set in a rain-soaked coastal town where river, forest, and mill define life, the book pits rugged individualism against communal solidarity. When the unionized loggers strike, the Stampers sign a contract to keep supplying logs, making them outcasts and targets for sabotage. The river is more than backdrop: its tides, floods, and deadfalls set the rhythm and danger that shape the family’s fate.

Plot
At the head of the clan stands iron-willed patriarch Henry Stamper and his formidable son, Hank. Their resolve is legendary and isolating. Into this tense household returns Leland “Lee” Stamper, Henry’s sensitive, educated younger son from back East. Lee comes home nursing old grievances: years earlier, his mother took her life after an affair between Hank and her shattered the family. Lee’s plan is quiet revenge, aimed at undermining Hank where it hurts.

Hank’s wife, Viv, is caught between admiration for the family’s grit and exhaustion with its hard pride. Craving tenderness and change, she is drawn into Lee’s orbit. Their affair exposes the fault lines that Henry’s and Hank’s bravado has long concealed. Viv ultimately leaves, telling Hank that his unbending creed has left no room for her.

As tensions with the town escalate, the work turns perilous. Henry is maimed in an accident that costs him an arm. Then comes the novel’s most harrowing scene: Joe Ben Stamper, Hank’s exuberant cousin and tireless partner, becomes pinned under a shifting boom of logs in the river. With the tide rising, Hank tries everything to free him. Joe Ben laughs, prays, and drowns as the water closes over him, an image of fatal cheer in the face of the family’s implacable will.

Characters
Hank embodies physical prowess and defiance, a man who leads with his back and fists. Henry is his older echo, grim and indomitable. Lee is the countercurrent, wounded, ironic, and intellectually sharp, who comes intending to break the family and ends by being pulled into its terrible loyalty. Viv is the book’s clearest voice for a life beyond the creed, and her departure marks the cost of the Stampers’ stance. Joe Ben radiates joy that even tragedy cannot silence.

Themes and Style
Kesey explores the price of American individualism, measuring the courage in “never give an inch” against the damage it inflicts on love, community, and self. The river’s indifferent power mirrors the family’s stubborn flow. Narrative voices overlap, first person, third person, memory, and rumor, sliding in and out of characters’ heads with lyrical, colloquial rhythms. The result is a choral portrait of a town and a family locked in struggle with nature and one another.

Ending and Significance
Grief hardens into resolve. Hank and Lee finish the contract and raft the logs downriver past a jeering town. On the bow rides Henry’s severed arm, rigged upright with the middle finger extended, a macabre salute that crystallizes the Stampers’ defiance. The image is both triumph and indictment: they win the fight and lose almost everything that might have made the victory sweet. The title, echoing the folk line about taking “a great notion… to jump in the river and drown,” threads through the book’s final swell, where pride and water run deep and unyielding.