One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is a fiction novel by Ken Kesey. This novel is set in an Oregon asylum, and serves as a study of the institutional process and the human mind. Its curious style lays the foundation for a discussion about truth, as not every event described by the narrator is probable truth in the book's reality, such a decision is made by the reader. It was made into a movie in 1975 by Miloš Forman.

Ken Kesey

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a direct product of Kesey's time working as an orderly at the Menlo Park Asylum. Not only did he speak to the patients and witness the workings of the institution, he received electroconvulsive therapy and took psychoactive drugs as well as the same drugs as the patients to gain a deeper insight into their lives. What resulted was a vivid and painfully accurate portrayal of what the men underwent.

The Title

The title comes from Chief Bromden's memory of a rhyme his grandmother taught him when he was a child;

'One flew east, One flew west, One flew over the cuckoo's nest.'

This rhyme foreshadows the direction that the men will take after these events. The freedom that McMurphy has brought for them means that they will be able to begin their lives again and move off in different directions. Critics have suggested that the Chief's use of rhyme is a way of clearing his thoughts and resisting the 'fog' of the Combine.

Plot Overview

Narrated by the schizophrenic American Indian Chief Bromden (who starts out pretending to be deaf and dumb), much of the plot focuses on the antics of Randle P. McMurphy, a criminal sent from a workfarm prison. Although never concretely confirmed, it is suggested that McMurphy has been admitted to the institution in order to avoid heavy manual labor at the prison.

The asylum is precisely run by Nurse Ratched and her assistants, who are described as black men filled with hatred. The patients are described as hen-pecked and emasculated by the nurse's system until McMurphy enters and completely disrupts her tight regime. As McMurphy builds the other patients' confidence, he gradually builds himself up for a great fall. Nurse Ratched's influence on the patients and the staff is immutable, and McMurphy slowly realises that most of the patients have voluntarily entered the asylum and he has much more to lose than they do.

Chief Bromden, whom the patients and staff believed to be deaf and dumb, speaks to McMurphy and eventually overcomes his schizophrenia through his influence, recognizing himself for the physical giant and mistreated man he has always been.

McMurphy frees the men from the shackles of the institution, only to be punished with a lobotomy. This results in McMurphy losing his vibrant personality and entering a flat, vegetative state. Chief Bromden realises that McMurphy is better off dead, and in the final moments of the novel suffocates him and escapes from the asylum by lifting a control panel with his new found power McMurphy showed him and tossing it through a window before escaping into the night. Which is when the title comes true that indeed one flew over the Cuckoos Nest. While some consider the ending downbeat due to the death of McMurphy, the redemption of Chief Bromden - who is the main character - provides an uplifting conclusion to the novel.

Characters

Randle Patrick McMurphy

A rough and ready convict sent from a prison. He is sexist, racist, forceful, and guilty of battery and gambling (he had also been charged with, but never convicted of, statutory rape. The fact that the girl refused to testify, in the context implies that she did not feel taken advantage of, and so this does not damage his character for the other protagonists). McMurphy has himself transferred from a prison work farm to the hospital, thinking it will be an easy way to serve out his sentence. He has a fine time hustling the patients, until he realizes that he is more than a diversion for them; he gives them the lives they are too afraid to live for themselves. In the end, McMurphy's determination to fight Nurse Ratched costs him his freedom, his health, and ultimately, his life. When considering Kesey's choice in the name for his protagonist, the initials R.P.M are significant in that they stand for 'revolutions per minute'. McMurphy certainly does bring about many revolutions. Rather than allowing the men to sit passively, he bursts onto the scene and injects life into them.

The Staff

Washington, Williams, and Warren

Three black men who work as aides in the ward. Williams is a dwarf, his growth stunted after witnessing his mother's rape by white men. The Chief says Nurse Ratched hired them for their capacity to hate. They are cruel and vindictive men who are unable to dominate McMurphy.

Doc Spivey

The spineless ward doctor. While Nurse Ratched managed to drive off all the other doctors, she kept Spivey because he always did as he was told. Harding suggests that the nurse may threaten to expose him as a drug addict, though whether he really is an addict is unknown. McMurphy's rebellion inspires him. He stands up to Nurse Ratched and accompanies the men on their fishing trip.

Nurse Pilbow

The night nurse for the ward. Her face, neck and chest are stained with a profound birthmark. She is intensely Catholic, and, according to the Chief, spends her time off praying for the birthmark to disappear. She blames the patients for infecting her with their evil, and takes it out on them. Both McMurphy and Harding have a crush on her.

The Japanese Nurse

A tiny woman, she runs the upstairs ward which is reserved for violent or otherwise unmanageable patients. She treats her patients kindly and openly opposes Nurse Ratched's methods.

The PR man

A strange individual who is responsible for the hospital's public relations. The patients suspect he wears a corset and sometimes he laughs hysterically when there are no other staff around. In a nightmare, the Chief sees him cut off the testicles of a dead patient as a trophy.

Geever

The night aide. He is the one who discovers that the Chief is hiding old wads of gum under his bed.

Mr. Turkle

An elderly African American man, he works the late, late shift in the ward. He agrees to allow McMurphy to host a party and sneak in prostitutes one night if the incentive is right.

The 'Acutes'

The acutes are patients who can still be cured. With few exceptions, they are there voluntarily.

Billy Bibbit

A patient at the institution with an extreme speech impediment. Nurse Ratched is a close friend of his mother, therefore leaving him powerless and almost voiceless. His mother treats him like he is a teenager, though in reality he is actually in his thirties. To alleviate Billy's fear of women, McMurphy sneaks a prostitute into the ward so Billy can lose his virginity. When it finally seems like Billy will become a man, Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother, driving him to suicide.

Dale Harding

The unofficial leader of the patients before McMurphy arrives. Harding is a pretty man and has the characteristics of a closeted homosexual, although it is never directly stated. He is driven to appear manly (the opposite of macho McMurphy, who is not afraid to let his artistic side show). Harding's gorgeous wife is a source of shame for Harding; he cannot pleasure her, making him feel even less like a man.

George Sorenson

A Swedish man who has a horrible fear of germs and contamination. He spends his days washing his hands in the ward's drinking fountain. McMurphy manages to convince him to lead a fishing expedition for the patients. Afterwards the staff try to forcibly delouse him, conscious of the mental anguish that they are causing him- and the fact that the de-lousing was mainly retribution by the nurse rather than medical. McMurphy and the Chief stop them and end up in the disturbed ward.

Cheswick

A loudmouth patient who is always demanding change in the ward, but never has the guts to see anything through. He finds a friend in McMurphy. When McMurphy is seen to be backing down in his fight against the nurse, Cheswick drowns himself in the swimming pool.

Martini

A patient who suffers from severe hallucinations. He frightens McMurphy by talking about all the people who need McMurphy to see them (the people who need McMurphy to stand up for them).

Scanlon

A patient obsessed with bombs and destruction. Aside from McMurphy, he is the only non-vegetative patient there by force, the rest could leave at anytime. It is Scanlon who convinces the Chief to escape.

Sefelt and Fredrickson

Two epileptic patients. Bruce Selfelt refuses to take his anti-seizure medication, as it makes his hair and teeth fall out. He is plagued by seizures, which the Chief believes are controlled by Nurse Ratched. Fredrickson takes Sefelt's share of the medication, because he is terrified of the seizures.

Max Taber

A patient who was released before McMurphy arrived. The Chief recalls how, after questioning what was in his medication, Nurse Ratched had him 'fixed.' He walked out of the hospital a sane man, a tribute to the Combine's awesome and terrible power.

The 'Chronics'

The chronics are patients who will never be cured. Many of the chronics are in vegetative states.

Ruckly

Ruckly was a hell-raising patient in the respect that he challenged the rules until his lobotomy. He now sits staring at a picture of his wife, and occasionally screaming profanity. He's kept in the ward as a reminder of what happens to patients who get out of line.

Ellis

Ellis had his brains fried by electroshock therapy. He stands frozen to the wall in the same Christ-like position (arms outstretched, like Christ on the cross), day after day.

Pete Bancini

Bancini suffered brain damage when he was born, but managed to hold down simple jobs until he was institutionalized. He sits, wagging his head, and complaining how tired he is. The Chief remembers how once, and only once, he lashed out violently against the aides, telling the other patients that he was a living miscarriage, born dead.

Rawler

A patient on the disturbed ward, he says nothing but 'loo, loo, loo!' all day. The Chief believes he's been wired to receive radio transmissions. One night Rawler castrates himself while sitting on the toilet and bleeds to death before anyone realizes what he's done.

Old Blastic

An old patient who is in a vegetative state. The first night McMurphy is in the ward, Bromden dreams Blastic is hung by his heel and sliced open, spilling out his rusty guts. The next morning it is revealed that Blastic died during the night.

The Lifeguard

An ex-professional football player, he still has the clear marks on his forehead from the injury that scrambled his brains. While he is the lifeguard at the hospital pool, he stays in the disturbed ward as he tackles the nurses occasionally. This is fine with him, because he doesn't realize he's in a mental hospital. It is the lifeguard who tells McMurphy that he will stay in the hospital until Nurse Ratched decides he may go, regardless of his original prison sentence.

Colonel Materson

The oldest patient in the ward, he suffers from severe senile dementia and cannot move without a wheelchair. He spends his days teaching a nonsense lesson from an imaginary text. The Chief believes there is logic to his babbling.

Supporting Characters

Candy

Candy is one of the prostitutes that McMurphy brings onto the ward for some fun. Her name suggests bringing sweetness into the men's lives.

Major Themes

Women as Castrators

With the exception of the prostitutes, who are portrayed as good, many of the major women characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are threatening and terrifying figures. Some exceptions are the aforementioned hookers, and some of the nurses not under Ratched's direct influence, such as the Japanese nurse. Bromden, the narrator, and McMurphy, the protagonist, both tend to describe the suffering of the mental patients as a matter of emasculation or castration at the hands of Nurse Ratched and the hospital supervisor, who is also a woman. The fear of women is one of the novel’s most central features. The male characters seem to agree with Harding, who complains, “We are victims of a matriarchy here.”

Indeed, most of the male patients have been damaged by relationships with overpowering women. For instance, Bromden’s mother is portrayed as a castrating woman; her husband took her last name, and she turned a big, strong chief into a small, weak alcoholic. According to Bromden, she built herself up emotionally, becoming bigger than either he or his father, by constantly putting them down. Similarly, Billy Bibbit’s mother treats him like an infant and does not allow him to develop sexually. Through sex with Candy, Billy briefly regains his confidence. It is no coincidence that this act, which symbolically resurrects his manhood, also literally introduces his penis to sexual activity. Thus, his manhood—in both senses—returns until Ratched takes it away by threatening to tell his mother and driving him to commit suicide.

More explicit images of and references to castration appear later in the novel, cementing Kesey’s idea of emasculation by the frigid nurse. Rawler, a patient in the Disturbed ward, commits suicide by cutting off his own testicles. The hospital, run by women, treats only male patients, showing how women have the ability to emasculate even the most masculine of men. Finally, near the end of the novel, after McMurphy has already received three shock treatments that do not seem to have had an effect on him, Nurse Ratched suggests taking more drastic measures: “an operation.” She means, of course, a lobotomy, but McMurphy beats her to the punch by joking about castration. Both operations remove a man’s individuality, freedom, and ability for sexual expression. Kesey portrays the two operations as symbolically the same.

Society’s Destruction of Natural Impulses

Kesey uses mechanical imagery to represent modern society and biological imagery to represent nature. By means of mechanisms and machines, society gains control of and suppresses individuality and natural impulses. The hospital, representative of society at large, is decidedly unnatural: the aides and Nurse Ratched are described as being made of motley machine parts. In Chief Bromden’s dream, when Blastic is disemboweled, rust, not blood, spills out, revealing that the hospital destroyed not only his life but his humanity as well. Bromden’s realization that the hospital treats human beings in an unnatural fashion, and his concomitant growing self-awareness, occur as a surrounding fog dissipates. It is no surprise that Bromden believes this fog is a construction of machines controlled by the hospital and by Nurse Ratched. Bromden, as the son of an Indian chief, is a combination of pure, natural individuality and a spirit almost completely subverted by mechanized society. Early on, he had free will, and he can remember and describe going hunting in the woods with his relatives and the way they spear salmon. The government, however, eventually succeeds in paying off the tribe so their fishing area can be converted into a profitable hydroelectric dam. The tribe members are banished into the technological workforce, where they become “hypnotized by routine,” like the “half-life things” that Bromden witnesses coming out of the train while he is on fishing excursions. In the novel’s present time, Bromden himself ends up semi-catatonic and paranoid, a mechanical drone who is still able to think and conjecture to some extent on his own.

McMurphy represents unbridled individuality and free expression—both intellectual and sexual. One idea presented in this novel is that a man’s virility is equated with a state of nature, and the state of civilized society requires that he be desexualized. But McMurphy battles against letting the oppressive society make him into a machinelike drone, and he manages to maintain his individuality until his ultimate objective—bringing this individuality to the others—is complete. However, when his wildness is provoked one too many times by Nurse Ratched, he ends up being destroyed by modern society’s machines of oppression.

The Importance of Expressing Sexuality

It is implied throughout the novel that a healthy expression of sexuality is a key component of sanity, and that repression of sexuality leads directly to insanity. Most of the patients have warped sexual identities because of damaging relationships with women. Perverted sexual expressions are said to take place in the ward: the aides supposedly engage in illicit “sex acts” that nobody witnesses, and on several occasions it is suggested that they rape patients, such as Taber, with Ratched’s implicit permission, symbolized by the jar of Vaseline she leaves with them. Add to that the castrating power of Nurse Ratched, and the ward is left with, as Harding says, “comical little creatures who can’t even achieve masculinity in the rabbit world.” Missing from the halls of the mental hospital are healthy, natural expressions of sexuality between two people.

McMurphy’s bold assertion of his sexuality, symbolized from the start by his playing cards depicting fifty-two sexual positions, his pride in having had a voracious fifteen-year-old lover, and his Moby-Dick boxer shorts, clashes with the sterile and sexless ward that Nurse Ratched tries to maintain. We learn that McMurphy first had sex at age ten with a girl perhaps even younger, and that her dress from that momentous occasion, which inspired him to become a “dedicated lover,” still hangs outdoors for everyone to see. McMurphy’s refusal to conform to society mirrors his refusal to desexualize himself, and the sexuality exuding from his personality is like a dress waving in the wind like a flag.

McMurphy attempts to cure Billy Bibbit of his stutter by arranging for him to lose his virginity with Candy. Instead, Billy gets shamed into suicide by the puritanical Ratched. By the end of the novel, McMurphy has been beaten into the ground to the point that he resorts to sexual violence—which had never been a part of his persona previous to being committed, despite Nurse Pilbow’s fears, by ripping open Ratched’s uniform.

False Diagnoses of Insanity

McMurphy’s sanity, symbolized by his free laughter, open sexuality, strength, size, and confidence, stands in contrast to what Kesey implies, ironically and tragically, is an insane institution. Nurse Ratched tells another nurse that McMurphy seems to be a manipulator, just like a former patient, Maxwell Taber. Taber, Bromden explains, was a “big, griping Acute” who once asked a nurse what kind of medication he was being given. He was subjected to electroshock treatments and possibly brain work, which left him docile and unable to think. The insanity of the institution is foregrounded when a man who asks a simple question is tortured and rendered inhuman. It is a Catch-22: only a sane man would question an irrational system, but the act of questioning means his sanity will inevitably be compromised.

Throughout the novel, the sane actions of men contrast with the insane actions of the institution. At the end of Part II, when McMurphy and the patients stage a protest against Nurse Ratched for not letting them watch the World Series, a sensible request for which McMurphy generates a sensible solution, she loses control and, as Bromden notes, looks as crazy as they do. Moreover, Kesey encourages the reader to consider the value of alternative states of perception, which some people also might consider crazy. For instance, Bromden’s hallucinations about hidden machinery may seem crazy, but in actuality they reveal his insight into the hospital’s insidious power over the patients.

In addition, when the patients go on the fishing excursion they discover that mental illness can have an aspect of power in that they can intimidate the station attendants with their insanity. Harding gives Hitler as an example in discussing Ratched, suggesting that she, like Hitler, is a psychopath who has discovered how to use her insanity to her advantage. Bromden, at one point, thinks to himself, “You’re making sense, old man, a sense of your own. You’re not crazy the way they think.” “^*razy the way they think,” however, is all that matters in this hospital. The authority figures decide who is sane and who is insane, and by deciding it, they make it reality.

Gambling

Although the men lose a lot of money to McMurphy, he shows them how to take risks, a useful skill in the outside world. Nurse Ratched may call him a 'manipulator' but his manipulation is positive.

ISBNs

ISBN 0606042393 (prebound, 1962)
ISBN 0451163966 (mass market paperback, 1963)
ISBN 0140043128 (paperback, 1977, reprint)
ISBN 0140236015 (hardcover, 1996)
ISBN 1556516851 (paperback, 1988)
ISBN 0453008151 (audio cassette, 1993, abridged)
ISBN 014028334X (paperback, 1999)
ISBN 0822071541 (e-book, 1999)
ISBN 0764586629 (paperback, 2000)
ISBN 0791063399 (library binding, 2001)
ISBN 0141181222 (paperback, 2002)
ISBN 0791071189 (paperback)

Ken Kesey

The Title

Plot Overview

Characters

The Staff

The 'Acutes'

The 'Chronics'

Supporting Characters

Major Themes

Further reading

ISBNs

See also:

Gourt Home::Gourt :: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)

Ken Kesey

The Title

Plot Overview

Characters

The Staff

The 'Acutes'

The 'Chronics'

Supporting Characters

Major Themes

Further reading

ISBNs

See also: