One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey

A cuckoo’s nest may be just a playful name for a madhouse (as well as slang for female genitalia), but the common association of cuckoos and insanity comes from the baffling and brutal behavior of cuckoos themselves.

Bromden makes it clear that the ultimate villain, if there is one at all, is the Combine: “... it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole Combine, the nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force, and the nurse is just a high-ranking official for them.”

So she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load.

But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

Now they tell me a psychopath’s a guy fights too much and fucks too much, but they ain’t wholly right, do you think? I mean, whoever heard tell of a man gettin’ too much poozle?

What the Chronics are—or most of us—are machines with flaws inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some vacant lot.

“Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I’m so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower.” “Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I’m so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice!”

The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine. The slightest thing messy or out of kilter or in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled fury.

They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate, and the black boys are out there performing her bidding before she even thinks it.

Catheters are second-hand condoms the ends clipped off and rubber-banded to tubes that run down pantlegs to a plastic sack marked DISPOSABLE NOT TO BE RE-USED, which it is my job to wash out at the end of each day.

The air is pressed in by the walls, too tight for laughing. There’s something strange about a place where the men won’t let themselves loose and laugh, something strange about the way they all knuckle under to that smiling flour-faced old mother there with the too-red lipstick and the too-big boobs.

Her face is quite handsome and well preserved. And in spite of all her attempts to conceal them, in that sexless get-up, you can still make out the evidence of some rather extraordinary breasts. She must have been a rather beautiful young woman. Still—for the sake of argument, could you get it up over her even if she wasn’t old, even if she was young and had the beauty of Helen?”

She’ll turn that dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don’t move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers. The clock hands hang at two minutes to three and she’s liable to let them hang there till we rust.

Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe.

You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.

Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy. He knows there’s a painful side: he knows my thumb smarts and his girl friend has a bruised breast and the doctor is losing his glasses, but he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.

Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ‘em inna pens ... wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock ... one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest ... O-U-T spells out ... goose swoops down and plucks you out.