One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). Detailed description

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey’s first published novel, appeared in 1962. While enrolled in the graduate writing program at Stanford University in 1959, Kesey made extra money as a paid volunteer at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, California, in some of the earliest government drug experiments with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. In 1961, he took a job as a nighttime aide in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital, and he spent hours talking with the patients there, sometimes under the influence of psychedelic drugs. His hallucinations coupled with his personal experiences primed Kesey to write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a story not just about conceptions of insanity and drug use, but about the macrocosm of post-World War II American society at large.

The novel takes place almost entirely within the walls of a mental institution somewhere outside Portland, Oregon. The narrator, Chief Bromden (nicknamed “Chief Broom” by the aides because his duties include sweeping), feigns deafness and muteness in order to avoid interaction with others in the hospital, as well as to gain access to otherwise restricted spaces. Kesey conceived of Bromden while under the influence of peyote, when the tall and broad American Indian appeared to him as a hallucination. Though Bromden has great physical presence, he, as have the other men in the hospital, has been made to feel small by the dehumanizing efforts of the hospital staff, as well as the larger oppressive network, which Bromden refers to as the “Combine.”

Literally speaking, a combine refers not just to a conspiratorial combination of persons, but also to an agricultural machine that physically cuts down grain. Likewise, the men are cut down until the arrival of a new patient, Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy, whose initials (R.P.M.) also stand for “revolutions per minute,” has been committed to the hospital after convincing the work farm where he was imprisoned for assault and battery of his insanity. He is a rambunctious redhead and immediately fills the ward with the previously unheard sound of laughter. His reintroduction of laughter, along with gambling, sexuality, and general rebelliousness, begins to free the men from the stranglehold of Nurse Ratched, or Big Nurse, the head of the ward and the chief oppressor of the men, along with her black attendants.

The word ratchet literally means a set of teeth which mesh with a cog in a machine, and Nurse Ratched is indeed a component of the machinery of the Combine. She strips the men of their power through emasculation, contributing to one of the major themes in the novel: the castration of men at the hands of women. Nearly all of the women in Kesey’s novel are portrayed as threatening to men. In addition to Nurse Ratched, the supervisor of the hospital is a woman, leading Harding, a patient who is tortured by his wife’s overt sexuality, to conclude, “We are victims of a matriarchy here.” Another of the patients, Billy Bibbit, is a 31-year-old man whose mother does not allow him to develop into an adult, particularly in terms of sexual development.

When Bibbit finally achieves some sense of sexual maturity (after sleeping with a prostitute who is a friend of McMurphy’s), Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother, leading him to commit suicide. Even Bromden suffers at the hands of an overbearing woman. His father takes his wife’s last name and eventually loses his land and his sense of self-worth, later turning to alcoholism, as a result of her henpecking. Though Kesey’s portrayal of women has been regarded as a reflection of a culture in which women sought increasing “masculine” qualities, such as independence and power in the workplace and home, it is now widely read as sexist representation.

However, Kesey did not intend to suggest that women were solely responsible for dehumanization; rather, Cuckoo’s Nest also focuses on the degradation of society and the individual as a result of alienation from nature. Bromden in particular, whose childhood memories are filled with recollections of the natural world, relies on communion with nature in order to maintain his sanity. At the beginning of the novel, Bromden lives in a world clouded by a fog machine created by his own paranoia, as well as his convoluted memories of his time as a soldier. As he regains his sense of self, the fog begins to fade. He begins to reunite with nature, first by looking out his window for the first time in a long while to watch a dog run around the grounds of the hospital and then by venturing outside the hospital with several of the men, led by McMurphy, on a fishing trip. In the end, Bromden is capable of lifting a heavy control panel and throwing it through the window, finally leaving the hospital and reuniting with the outside world.

Bromden’s escape suggests Kesey’s alliance with an activist reaction to oppression, and in turn, his movement away from existing literary models. As a writer during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey was situated near the end of what was called the “Beat generation.” The Beats were writers who felt ostracized from mainstream American culture, which in their minds sought to eliminate individuality and convert creative people into automatons.

This ideology is clearly evident in Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale of men repressed by a symbolic mental hospital. At the same time, though, the Beats’ solution to the problem was withdrawing from society and remaining in bohemian communities. Kesey, though, created characters like McMurphy, whose incendiary actions eventually stir up enough trouble that several men are able to escape the hospital system, whether they run away as Bromden does or sign out legitimately as Harding does. His movement away from pessimistic complacency and toward rebellious action helped to instigate a shift in 1960s counterculture and contributed to the great success of Cuckoo’s Nest with younger student readers.

Another, perhaps more progressive, allusion to the Beats is Kesey’s invocation of the American transcendentalists. The transcendentalists believed in the sanctity of nature, coupled with the triumph of the individual spirit. Walt Whitman, through whom transcendentalism was filtered to Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, also added the glorification of the physical body, which Kesey adopted as part of McMurphy’s character. For instance, after McMurphy takes his first shower in the hospital and is walking around in a towel, Nurse Ratched confronts his nudity with disgust.

She, on the other hand, dresses so as to conceal her large breasts, and the patients interpret her resulting sexual unavailability, her coldness, as an expression of the inhuman institution itself. Kesey also interprets transcendentalist ideals in his focus on the role and responsibilities of the traditional hero, both in Cuckoo’s Nest and in his later novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. As does Notion’s Hank Stamper, McMurphy prides himself on his staunch individuality, even at the expense of his own physical and emotional well-being.

Unlike the transcendentalists, though, who pulled their heroic models from classical myth, Kesey’s heroes resemble those of superhero comic books, western movies, and other elements of American popular culture. At the close of the patients’ party in the ward, Harding references the Lone Ranger as he speaks of McMurphy’s fleeing the ward, saying, “I’d like to stand there at that window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask, ‘Who wawz that’er masked man?’ as you ride—” The alliance of Kesey’s characters with such heroes and villains allows their conflicts to be simplified into epic battles of good versus evil. Furthermore, Kesey validates the inclusion of popular culture references in an allegedly highbrow art form and allows the reader to experience some of his early childhood literary influences, such as Marvel comics and the adventure stories of writers like Zane Grey.

Kesey also grew up under the influence of Protestant Christianity, and its effects are evident in McMurphy’s role as a Christ-like savior. Throughout the novel, McMurphy’s fellow patients are transformed from awed onlookers to devoted disciples, who turn to him to be saved. As with Christ, McMurphy’s actions lead him to sacrifice; as McMurphy undergoes shock treatment, he even uses the language of crucifixion, saying to the technician as graphite salve is applied to his temples, “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?” And after recovering from shock treatments, Bromden, the mute whom McMur- phy has made able to speak, returns to the ward proclaiming McMurphy’s heroism. In the end, McMurphy’s loss of life, as a result of both his lobotomy and his later mercy killing by Bromden, allows the other patients to have real and fulfilling lives.

At the time of its publication, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest received mostly favorable reviews and was adapted into a play in 1963 by Dale Was- serman. In 1975, Milos Forman directed the film version, which won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best actor (Jack Nicholson), and best actress (Louise Fletcher). Kesey wrote a screenplay for the film, but Forman rejected it, stating that he did not believe that Bromden’s narration would translate well to the screen. Kesey then rejected the film and vowed never to watch it. His novel, though, still generates much critical attention and is widely taught as part of the American literary canon. It remains in print in several editions, including one in the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century series. It retains its revolutionary power and continues to influence readers and writers alike.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Within the first few pages of the novel, Bromden recounts, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” In literary studies, the term unreliable narrator refers to a narrator whose credibility is compromised for any of a number of reasons, such as bias, naivete, or lack of knowledge. Discuss how Bromden may be read as an unreliable narrator, providing specific examples from the novel.

2. Contemporary readers sometimes consider One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be a racist novel. Discuss how nonwhite characters are represented differently from white characters in the novel, particularly Bromden and the black “boys.”

3. The film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest has become very successful in its own right, although Kesey himself condemned it. Compare the film version to the novel. How does the story change without Bromden’s narration?

4. Kesey’s experimentation with drugs was an important influence on him as he was writing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. However, he also had experience working in a mental hospital, where drugs are used in very different ways. How are drugs and drug use represented in the novel?

5. Some scholars suggest that connections exist between Cuckoo’s Nest and Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851). Identify allusions to Melville’s novel and discuss why Kesey may have included them.