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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ken Kesey

Start date: March 1, 2016

Finish date: March 31, 2016

Discussion: New School Classics- 1915-2005

Why we're reading this: Revisit the Shelf Group Read, March 2016

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[close] Revisit the Shelf Group Read, March 2016

Previous Group Reads:
- Book of the Month, November 2010
- Revisit the Shelf Group Read, August 2014

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New School Classics- 1915-2005

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What Members Thought

Jul 12, 2011 Brad rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: crazier-than-a-lobotomized-mcmurphy, one-of-the-greats, classic

i. Lost the damn book! Shit.

ii. Found it!

iii. Finished, but I need some time to let this sink in. The review is coming.

iv. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about non-conformity. It is also about the horrors of the mental health system circa the late ‘50s & early ‘60s. I am sure it is about some other things I didn’t pick up this time around. But it is also about metaphor, and that was the theme in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that most spoke to me.

Chief Bromden is the narrator, you see, a ...more

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Nov 12, 2022 Alex rated it really liked it

I read the book after seeing the movie. Both were funny and entertaining, but their influence on attitudes toward mental illness was toxic, spreading Thomas Szasz's theory that mental illness was a myth. ...more

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Jun 20, 2011 Maggie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: boxall-1001, fiction, general-fiction, usa, guardian-1000, medicine, classics, unreliable-narrator

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. First, a synopsis. Set in the 1960's, this book is narrated by an American Indian called Chief Bromden, a patient in an all-male mental ward in a hospital. The patients of the ward are tyrannized by Nurse Ratched, a lady who, with mild-sounding insinuations and threats of electroshock therapy or lobotomy made with a smile, keeps her ward running like tick-tock. The oppressed patients dare not even laugh. The Chief, “a six-foot-eight sweeping machine" who is "scared of its own shadow”, has preten First, a synopsis. Set in the 1960's, this book is narrated by an American Indian called Chief Bromden, a patient in an all-male mental ward in a hospital. The patients of the ward are tyrannized by Nurse Ratched, a lady who, with mild-sounding insinuations and threats of electroshock therapy or lobotomy made with a smile, keeps her ward running like tick-tock. The oppressed patients dare not even laugh. The Chief, “a six-foot-eight sweeping machine" who is "scared of its own shadow”, has pretended to be deaf and dumb for decades to appear harmless, such that the staff, including Nurse Ratched and her three black aides, allow him to listen to their secrets. One day, a new patient, Randle McMurphy, arrives. He is a swaggering gambling redhead, who got himself into the mental ward to escape from a work farm. Straight away, his bold laughter sets him apart. He makes friends with all the Acutes, chumming up with all of them regardless of how queer they are, making bets and playing poker with them. He battles the conformity and oppression of Nurse Ratched's rule with his wild antics, initially in response to a self-initiated bet, but continues with the fight even after the bet has been won. At one point, he realises that his antics will only lengthen his stay and he begins to toe the line, but when his refusal to support one of the other patients, Cheswick, in his argument with the Nurse leads to Cheswick's suicide, McMurphy restarts his quest with a new vengeance. Under his lead, the patients slowly start coming out of their shell. Even the Chief begins to talk. This culminates in a fishing expedition that takes place despite the Nurse's strong opposition, with even the doctor joining in. The Nurse then makes her move by telling the patients that McMurphy has been making money off the rest through his bets. This creates some resistance against McMurphy, and indirectly leads to McMurphy and the Chief fighting with the black aides to protect the mysophobic George from them. The two are sent to the Disturbed ward, where McMurphy receives multiple rounds of electroshock therapy. When they eventually return to the ward, McMurphy organises a date night between a prostitute, Candy Starr, and one of the other patients, Billy Bibbit. The night turns into a drunken party. During the clean-up the next day, Nurse Ratched finds Billy with the girl. She threatens to tell Billy's mother about the party, and Billy commits suicide. McMurphy attacks the nurse. At the end, most of the Acutes leave the ward. Nurse Ratched loses her power but has McMurphy lobotomized. The Chief suffocates McMurphy, who has turned into a dummy, then, with the strength given back to him by McMurphy's confidence in him, throws a console panel out a window and escapes.

This book was absolutely mind-blowing. Kesey had a history of working in a mental hospital and taking LSD for a CIA-financed project, and his descriptions are powerfully vivid and startlingly clear. He has a knack for such realistic descriptions that even the Chief's hallucinations, though the reader knows are imaginary, feel real, for they are real in the Chief's mind.

The Chief, being a paranoid schizophrenic, is an unreliable narrator, but, as he stays near the start, "it's the truth even if it didn't happen". Some things are clearly products of the Chief's imagination, such as the Combine, which is the Chief's idea of a totalitarian "They", the Combine's machinery and fog which it uses to control the patients, and even the green slime on the walls which the Chief works hard to clean away. Yet in a world where the Nurse's visible facade of a "sweet, smiling, tender Angel of Mercy" fails to the intangible, ill-defined insinuations behind her looks and seemingly harmless words, these products of the Chief's imagination reveal the truth more clearly than anything visible. There may not be a Combine operating machinery, but Kesey wants us to know that there are societal norms that force us to behave in more or less the same ways, such that anyone who is different, who is wild, who, like Kesey, drives a magic bus full of drugged men behaving bizarrely, is frowned on and even labelled insane.

This book was a product of an era where America was strongly anti-Communist, and Nurse Ratched represents the totalitarian rule that Kesey saw and fought against. She controls the ward not through physical means but through mind games, and with her words beats all the courage and soul out of the men more than any physical action could. She is characterised by her composure, and every time she loses a little of her composure, she loses a battle. She is extremely busty, but her chest is hidden by her starched white uniform, and at the end, McMurphy's ripping open of her uniform to show her enormous breasts is a representation of her absolute loss of control, even her control over her God-given femininity.

If the mental ward represents our society, the oppressed patients represent the normal population, and Nurse Ratched represents the tools that are used to keep us in line, I suppose McMurphy represents Kesey. McMurphy is a blast of unfettered life and masculinity in an emasculated community. He comes in swaggering, and with his charm and charisma, quickly wins the hearts of the reader and turns into a hero for the patients. He is not a perfect man. He has been charged with statutory rape, got himself into the mental institution because he expected it to be more luxurious than the work camp, sleeps with prostitutes, and uses his charm to win the other patients' money through gambling. But instead of weakening him, these flaws only make his strengths stand out even greater in contrast. Which rebellious cowboy would make friends with a bunch of stuttering cowards? Yet McMurphy accepts them all and even fights for their cause. He goes on winking and grinning and laughing long after he has lost the energy to, because he sees that what the patients need is not more shame and self-imposed alienation, but courage and the self-confidence to accept their differences. Every patient changes. The Chief, whose father used to be a tribal chief but married a white woman, was forced by the government to give up his Indian life, and drank himself to his death, has not spoken by habit since his childhood when some white men treated him like he was mute and deaf. Under McMurphy's influence, he gains the courage to talk and even to fight. With McMurphy's confidence, the Chief even regains his strength – presumably not because it wasn't there from the start, but because the Chief didn't dare to use it, or didn't believe that he could make use of it.

But after McMurphy starts receiving electroshock therapy, it is clear that he is rebelling not for himself, but because the expectations of the other patients drives him to it. It is queer. In a book about the fight of the individual against societal expectations, McMurphy seems to be acting not purely from individual will, but from the will of his community. In the end, we are all bound to our communities. Many things that we do are responses to the expectations of our communities.

This book made me think about what defines a psychiatric patient. Many psychiatric patients are like normal people, but have taken a certain characteristic over an ill-defined line. George, for instance, has taken a perversion to dirt, which many people have, to an extreme. But who defines whether this characteristic makes us mad, or simply makes us unique? What drives patients to seek psychiatric treatment? Is it really something pathological? Or is it guilt and shame, imposed by society, telling people that their differences are unacceptable? If society were organised differently, would these socially unacceptable differences become acceptable? And can psychiatric treatment worsen mental health by enlarging the shame that men feel for differences that they cannot get rid off? It is a sobering thought. Perhaps what is needed is not more medical treatment, but more reassurance. ...more

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