Something peculiar happens when Charlie Cheswick, one of the characters in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), asks the ward’s head nurse about his cigarettes. The nurse controls the supply of cigarettes, and Cheswick does not relish that idea. However, his intended speech act, a complaint as well as a request, is ignored. Expressing the collective thought of the patients, he stresses that “[w]e want something done about it” (149). As he notices that his request does not have the desired effect nor the presupposed backup, he first increases the intensity of his request—shouting “I want something done! Hear me!” (149) —and then flies into a rage. Whether he puts his speech act in a polite formula or in a very intensive exclamation, it is not accepted as a conventional act. The scene is symptomatic not only of Cheswick’s character development but also of the fictional interactions and textual dynamics in Kesey’s novel. Looking at the scene from this angle, we catch a glimpse of the way in which our understanding can improve by an analysis of the speech acts of characters and narrators. From its foundation in the work of J. L. Austin until today, the theory of speech acts has been living several lives, one of which is in the world of narrative studies. Many scholars, such as Seymour Chatman and Susan Lanser, have integrated aspects of the theory into narratology, and a number of them, such as Mary Louise Pratt, Michael Kearns and Reingard Nischik, have granted it a prominent and permanent position in their narratological models. They basically argue that what authors, narrators and characters do with words—i.e., the illocutionary force