Huh? Care to share a title with the uninformed among us?
Okay, but you really should watch the movie. It deserved all them Oscars.
Now, the book is written from the Chief’s perspective, and the reader knows from the beginning he’s faking the deaf-mute bit. However, in the movie, he’s just seen as a big “deaf-and-dumb” crazy man. When McMurphy hands him a stick of gum halfway through the film, the Chief says “Thank you.” Jack Nicholson’s jaw drops, and that’s the beginning of the second half of the movie.
ETA: Watching the movie with someone who hasn’t read the book always leads to a good jaw dropping at that point.
If I may, I believe Clark K’s inquiry is because you never identified what book/movie you’re talking about.
It’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Another book with a major twist is Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. (Actually, it has two, but the first one is brilliant, feels completely fair, and doesn’t seem like a “stunt” by the author.) One of the main characters, whose mother died at birth, has been physically abused by her father for years. She finally escapes by moving away. Toward the end of the book, she finds out that her “father” is actually her mother, who, after being raped, runs away and lives as a man.
An unjustly forgotten mystery author, Percival Wilde, wrote a series of books in a similar format. He’s break the plot down into five section, each told first person - in very distinctive voices - about a murder and its investigation.
The twist is that one of the five always turns out to be the murderer, whose actions are given without lies but artfully concealed or made misleading.
Yeah, Christie did this once. But she couldn’t write in five distinctive voices if Poirot had a gun to her had. Doing this repeatedly is mind-boggling.
Some titles to look for: Design for Murder; Mystery Week-End; Tinsley’s Bones. I think *Inquest *is in the same style, but I haven’t read it yet.
In Rage, one of Stephen King’s books (under his pseudonym Richard Bachman), he writes about a high-school boy who kills a teacher and takes his class hostage. Prior to doing this, he visits his locker to retrieve the handgun he will use, and removes his combination lock (which he calls “Titus, the Helpful Padlock”), casually dropping it into his shirt pocket.
About 100 pages later, as the boy is on the verge of shooting one of his classmates, a police sniper – who has been keeping the boy in his sights through a window for several minutes, unbeknownst to us – shoots him in the chest. As best I can recall, one chapter ends with the boy telling us (the book is in first-person) “I was on the verge of shooting him, but they shot me first.”
The next chapter, which is very short, explains the backstory on the sniper, and how he shot the boy exactly where he wanted to – right in the chest, aiming for the heart.
And the line that has stayed with me for roughly 30 years now: Where it struck the hard steel of Titus, the Helpful Padlock.
I remember being dumbfounded by that realization, and immediately flipping back to the section where he removed the lock and re-reading it, and then going back to the shooting, and being amazed at how cleverly the whole thing was set up. When the previous chapter had ended, I thought the boy, the narrator, was dead, or at least severely wounded, and the book was going to end soon. Instead, he was okay (well, relatively), and we had another 100 pages or so to go.
Thank you!
Another good author for doing this is the late Tom Tryon. His first book The Other had a mind blowing scene right in the middle. And Lady is really a jaw dropper. Why that one hasn’t been made in a movie is beyond me.
[spoiler] The Other–Holland is dead.
Lady–The rich, young window’s caretakers are not a husband and wife. They are brother and sister. And she is having a physical relationship with the brother. Which, since she is rich and white and he is black and it’s set in the Depression, is outside of societal norms[/spoiler]