One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

After years of watching patients come and go, though most come and stay, Chief Bromden understands and relies on the routines of the psychiatric hospital that also serves as his home. He keeps to himself, sweeping the hallways and struggling constantly against the Combine, the machinery that Nurse Ratched uses to run the psychiatric ward and slowly turn patients into automatons. This steady system is suddenly and irreversibly upset with the appearance of McMurphy, a man who lives excessively and earned his spot in the psychiatric ward for fighting in a prison work camp. McMurphy immediately sets to disrupting the hospital routines, intentionally provoking Nurse Ratched, and imbuing the patients with an unexpected vitality. After years of constant struggle against the Combine, Chief Bromden finds himself more engaged with the world than even he thought possible. However, McMurphy’s behavior lands him locked in a power struggle with Nurse Ratched. Although he is aware of the extent of her power, he continues to try to thwart the system, threatening her carefully procured routines, systems, and appearances. While Nurse Ratched holds ultimate authority on the ward, McMurphy’s raucous approach to life proves insidious and pervasive, undermining Nurse Ratched even as she seems to have won.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey is a powerful, challenging, and all-around disruptive story of life on a psychiatric ward. Kesey’s choice of Chief Bromden as the narrator provides a dual perspective of life on the ward because he speaks as both an observer and a participant. Throughout most of the novel, as in most of Bromden’s life, the reader loses awareness of Bromden as a primary character, only to be surprised by his independence during lucid moments in which he is free from the influence of the Combine. Bromden’s schizophrenic reality offers an exaggerated yet incisive critique of society, which can be both safely condoned and safely discarded because he is a patient on a psychiatric ward. In the character of McMurphy, Kesey creates neither a hero nor an anti-hero, but an opposition to Nurse Ratched and everything good and bad in the system of the psychiatric ward. For every bold play by McMurphy, Nurse Ratched exerts her authority with an equally powerful yet restrained response. The novel is imbued with complexities, nuances, and strong yet subtle challenges to conventional thinking.

I love this story. Well, I love parts of this story. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is uncomfortable and unsettling because it operates in shades of grey. No single character or plotline in the book is entirely good or right, and neither is there anything that is entirely bad or wrong. Kesey brings in countless significant themes that require thorough contemplation before coming to any kind of conclusion, which, at best, results in more shades of grey. Mental illness, institutionalization, self-determination, stigma, violence. This novel has a lot of heavy stuff to wrestle with, which makes for fabulous reading. I feel like I could analyze this book for days.