A review by sidharthvardhan
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

5.0

“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”

The biggest criticism with this book or, at least, with its characters is racism and misogyny that shows up. However I think author was recording how people behave. The patients aren’t racist and misogynist in their thoughts and actions, but are so in a self-defence based on a kind of fallacious reasoning. It is general tendency that whenever we are harmed by an individual, we just can’t make do with forming opinion about the person but find a group of which he or she is a member but we aren’t – and hold that whole group responsible. And so even though patients develop a friendship with other women and another black men, they just assume that Ms. Ratcherd’s behaviour is so because she is a woman and when there is a fight with black ‘boys’, they start using racist language. That might be kind of why hate-crimes increased after 9/11 in US – people who had no prejudice against Muslims suddenly developed it in some sort of cognitive response (although I’m not sure what that word means). I think author is just portraying behaviour of people and none of his characters is perfect.

Foxes and Rabbits

“nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”

One of the characters uses a metaphor of foxes and rabbits in the story. The rabbits are most of us and the foxes are the kind of people, who seem to want to use other people and are even prepared to harm others for their personal advantage. They are usually the kind of people who end up rising higher up in the hierarchy – managers, generals, your stereotype type bad boss, the people who have the loudest voice s when they are debating, the bullies, the pickup artists etc. We all know the kind – the people who will feed and increase your insecurity, who are prepared to eat into you for personal advantage. They would think the whole world is a game of chess and you are at war with everyone, wherever they find someone weak, they make their move. Most, that is, rabbits are not like that – we are natural, peace loving, easily trusting people who can’t hate someone enough to harm them in such a planned way, so lack the kind of competitive spirit and tend to avoid conflict.

“Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes—people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst.”

And rabbits are bound to lose to such foxes for rabbits only play defensive, they can’t be aggressive.

“She don't lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that.”

Most of the rabbits adapt to this constant threat of being attacked and so learn to live in the world – with fear and insecurities and in conformity to rules against them. Think workers working on minimum wages in MNCs!

Shut-ins

“But did you ever have people l-l-laughing at you?”

However there are a few who can’t handle such attacks and can’t confirm either, they give in, break down, go mad or shut themselves away – they come to believe that they can’t live in a world like that. The asylum is full of patients who are exactly like that. Many of them are there voluntarily – to shut themselves away from the world. They are willingly to accept the torturing treatment given to them by society instead. The point they seem to be missing is that they are hardly better being shut in. They aren’t any less vulnerable to those foxes, but being away from all the soft pleasures of the world that eases life when one lives among normal people, they might in fact be far more vulnerable. Perhaps what is lacking in them more than anything else is self-confidence and assertiveness - and that laughter is the best medicine.

“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”

Mckensky, a rebel, con-man and a psychopath (now that is kind of protagonist I like), slowly realises the problem – he does more for these people than institution ever did. He teaches them to fight back in self-defence. We aren’t all naturally good fighters, some of us have to learn. And he had to break rules, start rebellition for that. And so was asylum intentionally keeping them down? Well, perhaps not intentionally. But I think that there is general agreement about mental hospitals not being best of places to cure a diseased mind.

“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”

The narrator is prone to Shyzopernic – and it puts an asterisk on this whole black-and-white imagine of characters.May be the Big Nurse was the good person after all. It reminds one of a class-room scene where class rebel is questioning some rule difficult to follow and teacher is like ‘it is for your own good’ and you can’t be sure who is right. But like most good unreliable-narrator books, it is more fun reading if you take the narrator on his word, rather than guessing the truth behind what he is saying.

“But it's the truth even if it didn't happen”

*
And now that the author chose to give away our secret i DON’T SEE ANY REASON FOR KEEPING IT:

“The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.”

And this ismy favourite:

“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.”