Kesey and the Pranksters were set on seeing the country through LSD-tinted glasses.

This view is accurate—Kesey is certainly interested in conformity and its discontents—but incomplete.

But Kesey makes a subtler point here as well, one that becomes more insistent as the novel progresses.

When Kesey wrote the novel, the Korean War was still fresh in recent memory, and World War II not far behind it.