The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-19

Part 3, Chapters 20-28

Part 4, Chapters 29-35

Part 4, Chapter 36-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Piggy’s Brain

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of violence and mental illness. Additionally, the source material cites offensive terms for people who have mental illnesses, which is replicated in this guide only in direct quotes of the source material.

The Best Minds incorporates numerous intertextual references, including the symbol of Piggy’s brain. A character from William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, Piggy represents logic and reason. Stranded on a desert island with a group of other boys, his presence maintains a semblance of order. However, Piggy is killed when another boy, Roger, rolls a boulder on top of him. In Golding’s novel, his death symbolizes the overthrow of reason and order by chaos.

Rosen’s memoir describes Michael’s fascination with Lord of the Flies as a boy. Recounting the plot to Jonathan, he emphasizes with horror that the “red stuff” left on the rock after Piggy’s death is the character’s brains. This incident foreshadows Michael’s fate later in the narrative when his own brain becomes figuratively “broken.” Like Piggy, Michael also embodies logic and reason until mental illness introduces disorder into his thought processes.

The Tortoise and the Hare

Rosen uses the symbol of the tortoise and the hare to represent the dynamic between himself and Michael. The comparison encapsulates their competitive rivalry and perception of life as a race. Throughout their childhood and adolescence, Michael resembles a hare, leaping ahead, while in comparison, Jonathan feels he makes the slow progress of a tortoise.

The imagery of the tortoise and the hare draws on the story of the same name from Aesop’s Fables. In this tale, the hare is so confident of his success in a race against the tortoise he stops and falls asleep, leaving the tortoise to overtake. The moral of the tale is that a slow yet steady route to success is more effective than a quick and careless one. The trajectory of this narrative is eventually echoed in Jonathan and Michael’s relationship, as Michael’s meteoric achievements early in life are eventually halted by his mental illness. Ultimately, it is slow and steady Jonathan who achieves their shared dream of becoming a published writer.

Cain and Abel

The Biblical image of Cain and Abel works as a complex motif in the text. On one level, Michael’s interest in the story of Cain, who murders his brother, foreshadows the fact that he too will take another person’s life. From another perspective, the motif represents the brotherhood between Jonathan and Michael, with Cain representing Jonathan.

During the onset of Michael’s paranoid schizophrenia, Jonathan identifies with Cain when he reflects, “I didn’t want to be my brother’s keeper” (219). The phrase mimics Cain’s declaration that he is not his “brother’s keeper” when God questions him about Abel’s whereabouts. Just as Cain’s statement reflects his unwillingness to take responsibility for his brother, Jonathan’s words express his desire to escape the painful reality of his friend’s illness. After Michael kills Carrie, Jonathan again “feel[s] like Cain” (462), believing he should have offered his friend more support.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The motif of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest speaks to the text’s theme of Attitudes Toward Mental Illness. Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel (and the 1975 movie of the same name) typifies the way state psychiatric hospitals were increasingly perceived during this era. Set in a psychiatric hospital, the narrative features the cruel and controlling character of Nurse Ratched. Ratched represents an oppressive society that essentially makes non-conformist individuals “mad.” Meanwhile the character of Randle McMurphy embodies rebellion against this system. McMurphy fakes mental illness to avoid prison but is eventually lobotomized when other methods of controlling him fail.

In The Best Minds, Rosen uses One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to demonstrate how misleading cultural representations contributed to the closing of most psychiatric hospitals (deinstitutionalization) and the dwindling of mental healthcare. The author points out that by the time Cuckoo’s Nest became a movie, the extreme treatments used in the narrative were rarely used in psychiatric facilities. Cuckoo’s Nest also exemplifies a trend toward idealizing mental illness during this period, perceiving it as a lifestyle choice rather than a disease.