Throughout the 1960s, American author Ken Kesey—figurehead of the 1960s counterculture movement and known today most notably for his piece de resistance and the subject of this book review, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—was notorious for throwing extravagant, well-documented parties known as “Acid Tests” known around the country as hotbeds of LSD (Acid) use, Grateful Dead music, fluorescent paint, black lights, and the anti-government, counter-culture, anti-conformity mentality that would eventually define a generation of writers and musicians. To many readers, this not-so-lofty, albeit entirely factual introduction of Kesey—and all could rest assured that I have not simply chosen to describe the most vulgar, unruly time of Kesey’s life to exaggerate a point or censure his character, but rather, that such “Acid Tests” are indeed an accurate representation of the life of Ken Kesey—engenders one question: is it really possible for such a boisterous, drug-addicted, radical man known for his bacchanalian adventures to join the ranks of Khaled Hosseini, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and other famous modern authors and contribute anything of merit to the literary world? Needless to say, Ken Kesey—the man who claimed to be neither a beatnik nor a hippie, for he believed himself too young for the former and too old for the latter—is on all of our tongues now and has become the literary gargantuan that he is because he defied such seemingly insurmountable odds and executed a novel that would define the triumphs and travails of an entire generation, cementing the foundation for the burgeoning “counterculture movement.” Though it may not exactly have the prestige of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Shelley’s Frankenstein, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those rare findings in literature: a laugh-out-loud funny, insightful, socially important work of unquestionable merit marked simultaneously by simple language, a manageable number of pages, and abounding symbolism, imagery, and allegorical elements that together make this work a thoroughly enjoyable and important read.
Using his own work experience in Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital—during which he experimented with several hallucinogenic drugs and often took the patients’ prescription drugs—as a spring board, Kesey demonstrates his uncanny ability to combine humor and levity with rich symbolic and allegorical value as he uses the dynamic interplay of several hospital patients and their administrators to gradually peel away at his anti-government message. Along the way, readers meet several quintessential literary characters comparable in their literary importance to Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, Holden Caulfield, and of course, my personal favorite, John Galt. Together, the complex characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest come to represent the destructive, dehumanizing force that bureaucracy can have on the individual, the ambiguity of the phrase “insanity,” and even the destructive nature of matriarchy and the misogynistic tendencies of 1960s society.
Set in a psychiatric hospital somewhere in Oregon, the novel begins with narrator Chief Bromden waking up to a typical day on the ward: three black aides mop the floor, cleaning the evidence of the lewd “sexual acts” of the night before Chief believes them guilty of. Though he is a behemoth of a man, standing at 6’7 with broad shoulders and chiseled features, all of the aides harass Chief, forcing him to take up their mopping responsibilities and calling him names such as “Chief Broom” and “soo-pah Chief:” all part of a normal day on the ward for Mr. Bromden. Seemingly incognizant of his own physical prowess, Chief is the object of much mockery throughout the ward, for he has mysteriously chosen to feign deafness and dumbness throughout his commitment in the psychiatric ward: though this may grant him access to the uncensored, unfiltered expressions to all of his peers, Chief stifles his own identity, self-respect, and expression for a seemingly arbitrary motivation to remain deceptively deaf and dumb. Chief, therefore, can be said to be massive and impressive physically, but lackluster, and even emaciated emotionally and intellectually. It is at this point that Kesey symbolically introduces a marked foil for Chief Bromden, and a superstar in the world of modern literature: Nurse Ratched. Described in the coldest, most inhuman of terms, Nurse Ratched is instantaneously characterized as a forced to be reckoned with on the ward: she is a machine of a woman, shiny and orange like polished steel whose only effeminate feature is her voluptuous bosom. The “Big Nurse”—a title which bears obvious allusion to Orwell’s Big Brother—exercises carte blanche authority over the ward, running her patients’ lives from behind the safety of her glass-encased Nurse’s Station. Almost immediately after the Nurse marches in, the humdrum events of this normal day on the ward are truncated by the unfamiliar clicking and clacking of iron heels on the cold tile floor outside accompanied by a sound even more foreign to the ward: raucous, genuine, wholehearted laughter. The heels and the vocal cords in question belong to the ward’s newest admitted patient: Randle Patrick McMurphy. Introduced as a man deemed insane for, pardon my French, “fightin’ too much and fuckin’ too much” with a penchant for gambling and a love of laughter, McMurphy is the antithesis to nearly every other man on the ward: he lives for the moment and embraces every opportunity for adventure without regard to the consequences, he is bursting at the seams with self-confidence and with hearty sexual drive, he is loud, animated, witty, and, in the words of Ken Kesey himself, has a tendency to “swagger” about the room, drawing attention away from the hitherto monotonous routine of ward life. With these three characters introduced—McMurphy, Nurse Ratched, and Chief Bromden—the stage is set for a dynamic struggle between the power-hungry Nurse and the discontented, resilient patients under the leadership of the crass, redheaded McMurphy. At the Nurse’s side is a cache of dehumanizing tactics—such as crippling, deceptive insinuation, divide-and-conquer warfare, unquestionable authority, control over all facilities, and a plastered smile and orange lipstick that collectively pall the entire ward and stifles individual expression in a metaphorically obscuring “fog.” McMurphy, determined to save his friends and fellow patients from the suffocating confinement of Nurse Ratched’s unyielding authority and forced conformation, enlists the help not only of Chief Bromden, but of the intellectualizing Harden, the thirty-one year old stuttering virgin Billy Bibbit, the aspiring rebel Cheswick, and other equally inane comrades in what becomes a dynamic power-struggle between the supposed “sane” and the supposed “insane;” between society’s exalted one’s and society’s rejects; between the, if I may broaden my focus and echo Karl Marx, bourgeoisie and the proletariat! When all is said and done, at the heart of Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s lies a counterculture novel employing a humorous twist to describe the degradative, confining nature of government and the urgency of individual self expression. By calling into question traditional interpretations of sanity, and completing the picture with misogynistic and sexual undertones, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is not only an exceedingly enjoyable book, but a work of literature integral to the counterculture movement and to American history in general.
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