One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

First edition
Author Ken Kesey
Cover artist Paul Bacon[1]
Country United States
Language English
Publisher Viking Press & Signet Books
Publication date
 1962
Pages 320
OCLC 37505041

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is a novel written by Ken Kesey. Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of the institutional processes and the human mind as well as a critique of behaviorism and a celebration of humanistic principles. It was adapted into the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman in 1963. Bo Goldman adapted the novel into a 1975 film directed by Miloš Forman, which won five Academy Awards.

Time Magazine included the novel in its "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005" list.[2]

Plot

The book is narrated by "Chief" Bromden, a gigantic and docile half-Native American inmate who presents himself deaf and mute. Bromden’s tale focuses mainly on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, who faked insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in the hospital rather than in prison. The head administrative nurse, Mildred Ratched, rules the ward with an iron fist and with little medical oversight. She is assisted by her three day-shift orderlies, and her assistant doctors.

McMurphy constantly antagonizes Nurse Ratched and upsets the routines of the ward, leading to constant power struggles between the inmate and the nurse. He runs a card table, captains the ward's basketball team, comments on Nurse Ratched's figure, incites the other patients to conduct a vote about watching the World Series on television, and organizes an unsupervised deep sea fishing trip. His reaction after claiming to be able to and subsequently failing to lift a heavy control panel in the defunct hydrotherapy room (referred to as the "tub room") – "But at least I tried" – gives the men incentive to try to stand up for themselves, instead of allowing Nurse Ratched to take control of every aspect of their lives. The Chief opens up to McMurphy, revealing late one night that he can speak and hear. A disturbance after the fishing trip results in McMurphy and the Chief being sent for electroshock therapy sessions, but even this punishment does little to curb McMurphy's rambunctious behavior.

One night, after bribing the night orderly, McMurphy smuggles two prostitute girlfriends with liquor onto the ward, and breaks into the pharmacy for codeine cough syrup, and later unnamed psychiatric medications. McMurphy persuades one of the women to seduce Billy Bibbit, a timid, boyish patient with a terrible stutter and little experience with women, so he can lose his virginity. Although McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift starts, he and the other patients instead fall asleep without cleaning up the mess of the group’s antics, and the morning staff discovers the ward in complete disarray. Nurse Ratched finds Billy and the prostitute in each other's arms, partially dressed, and admonishes him. Billy asserts himself for the first time, answering Nurse Ratched without stuttering. Ratched calmly threatens to tell Billy's mother what she has seen. Billy has an emotional breakdown, and once left alone in the doctor's office, commits suicide by cutting his throat. Nurse Ratched blames McMurphy for the loss of Billy's life. Enraged at what she has done to Billy, McMurphy attacks Ratched, attempting to strangle her to death, tearing off her uniform and revealing her breasts to the patients and aides who are watching. McMurphy is physically restrained and moved to the Disturbed ward.

Nurse Ratched misses a week of work due to her injuries, during which time many of the patients either transfer to other wards or check out of the hospital forever. When she returns she cannot speak, and is thus deprived of her most potent tool to keep the men in line. With Bromden, Martini, and Scanlon the only patients who attended the boat trip left on the ward, McMurphy is brought back in. He has received a lobotomy, and is now in a vegetative state, rendering him silent and motionless. The Chief smothers McMurphy with a pillow during the night in an act of mercy before lifting the tub room control panel that McMurphy could not lift earlier, throwing it through a window and escaping the hospital.

Background

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written in 1959 and published in 1962 in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement[3] and deep changes to the way psychology and psychiatry were being approached in America. The 1960s began the controversial movement towards deinstitutionalization,[4][5] an act that would have affected the characters in Kesey's novel. The novel is a direct product of Kesey's time working the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California.[6] Not only did he speak to the patients and witness the workings of the institution, but he voluntarily took psychoactive drugs, including mescaline and LSD, as part of Project MKUltra.[7]

In addition to his work with Project MKUltra, Kesey experimented with LSD recreationally. He advocated for drug use as a path to individual freedom,[8] an attitude that was reflected in the views of psychological researchers of the time.[9][10] In the 1960s LSD was thought to offer the best access to the human mind. Each individual's experiences were said to vary; emotions and experiences ranged from transformations into other life forms, religious experiences, and extreme empathy.[9] It was Kesey's experience with LSD and other psychedelics that made him sympathetic toward the patients.[11]

The novel constantly refers to different authorities that control individuals through subtle and coercive methods. The novel's narrator, the Chief, combines these authorities in his mind, calling them "The Combine" in reference to the mechanistic way they manipulate and process individuals. The authority of The Combine is most often personified in the character of Nurse Ratched who controls the inhabitants of the novel's mental ward through a combination of rewards and subtle shame.[11] Although she does not normally resort to conventionally harsh discipline, her actions are portrayed as more insidious than those of a conventional prison administrator. This is because the subtlety of her actions prevents her prisoners from understanding that they are being controlled at all. The Chief also sees the Combine in the damming of the wild Columbia River at Celilo Falls, where his Native American ancestors hunted, and in the broader conformity of post-war American consumer society. The novel's critique of the mental ward as an instrument of oppression comparable to the prison mirrored many of the claims that French intellectual Michel Foucault was making at the same time. Similarly, Foucault argued that invisible forms of discipline oppressed individuals on a broad societal scale, encouraging them to censor aspects of themselves and their actions. The novel also criticizes the emasculation of men in society, particularly in the character of Billy Bibbit, the stuttering acute who is domineered by both Nurse Ratched and his mother.

Title

The title of the book is a line from a nursery rhyme:

Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest

Chief Bromden's grandmother sang this song to him when he was young.

Main characters

Staff

Acutes

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

Chronics

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

Other characters

Controversy

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of America's most highly challenged and banned novels.

Adaptations

The novel was adapted into a 1963 play, starring Kirk Douglas (who purchased the rights to produce it for the stage and motion pictures) as McMurphy and Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbit. A film adaptation, starring Jack Nicholson, and co-produced by Michael Douglas was released in 1975. The film went on to win five Academy Awards. The characters of Nurse Ratched and Chief Bromden appears as recurring characters in ABC's Once Upon a Time, where they are portrayed by Ingrid Torrance and Peter Marcin.

Editions

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The Covers of Paul Bacon". tumblr.com. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". Time. October 16, 2005.
  3. ↑ "America's Civil Rights Timeline". International Civil Rights Center & Museum. 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  4. ↑ Stroman, Duane (2003). The Disability Rights Movement: From Deinstitutionalization to Self-determination. University Press of America.
  5. ↑ Scherl, D.J.; Macht, L.B. (September 1979). "Deinstitutionalization in the absence of consensus". Hospital Community Psychiatry. 30 (9): 599–604. doi:10.1176/ps.30.9.599. PMID 223959.
  6. ↑ Mitchell & Snyder, p. 174
  7. ↑ Huffman, Bennett (May 17, 2002). "Ken Kesey (1935–2001)". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved March 10, 2009.
  8. ↑ "Ken Kesey Biography". Oregon History Project. 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  9. 1 2 Masters, R.E.L. & Jean Houston, (1966) The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, America Press Inc., 115(4). 110.
  10. ↑ The LSD Pother (1966), America Press Inc., 115(14). 377
  11. 1 2 3 "Life in a Loony Bin". Time. February 16, 1962. Retrieved March 10, 2009.
  12. 1 2 3 Gray, Richard (September 23, 2011). A History of American Literature. John Wiley & Sons. p. 574. ISBN 978-1-4443-4568-1. Retrieved June 15, 2015.
  13. ↑ "Banned & Challenged Classics". American Library Association. 2015. Retrieved June 15, 2015.

Further reading

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