One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey (Viking Press 1962)
- Edward Nightingale
- Nov 12, 2016
- 2 min read
One flew East, one flew West, and one flew over the...
There can’t be many heroes in English literature whose triumph is hoped for as much as Randle P McMurphy’s. By the same token, there are even fewer books I can think of which present a situation so grim that murder really seems the kindest thing. So this book – itself a product of Kesey’s experience of the ‘psychedelic sixties’ – has a couple of big things going for it. And it’s the best book about drugs I’ve read.
McMurphy is a protagonist about whom one could easily say, “You have to love him, warts and all.” But the thing about his warts is you’re never sure that diagnosis is correct, just like the “possible psychopath” diagnosis which lands him in Nurse Ratched’s ward at the start of the novel. At times he can seem sexist, racist, homophobic or bullying; but neither the other inmates nor the medical staff – and less still the reader – are ever certain they’re seeing the real Mac. Just as the doctors suspect he may faking his ‘repeated outbreaks of passion’ to escape the work farm, the reader finds it hard to accept any of Mac’s cruelty is a true manifestation of his character. Partly this is due to his enormous and constant capacity for fun, which goes hand in hand with his disregard for authority. And partly it’s the reader’s growing sense that everything he does is motivated by the love of his fellow patients.
The novel was published at a time when perceptions of psychiatry were changing, and it devastatingly portrays manipulation and brutality dressed up as medical science. The crisp, starched orderliness of Ratched and her ward conceals cruelty and corruption, acting as a metaphor for Freudian repression and a kind of institutional obsessive-compulsive disorder. But if all this sounds heavy, McMurphy and his effect on the other men more than compensate for it. The fishing trip he organizes – done so well in the 1975 film – is just as joyful a jailbreak in the book, but also has the pathos of a fleeting visit to Mac’s childhood home, during which his face in the rearview mirror looks ‘like there wasn’t enough time left for something he had to do….’
And this brings me to something the film could never do justice to (and, to be fair, doesn’t try to): the first-person narrator, Chief. He’s an enormous biracial Native American, whose deafness and muteness allow him to creep around the ward, listening in on things unheeded. Via flashbacks we learn how the government and the bottle did for his father and village, and how he’s grown terrified of the Combine – a shadowy entity controlling society, of which Ratched is an agent. He, along with a collection of insecure and vulnerable misfits, completes a pathetic, heroic, comic and tragic cast. Is Mac the man they’ve been waiting for? Can he really resist the Big Nurse? And is the risk of helping him too great? Battle lines are drawn the moment his steps first ring down the ward corridor.
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