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

challenging dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I'm reading classics this month, and I came to this book as a bit of unfinished business. I think I read about 5 pages in high school and not much more. I remember thinking it was strange. 
 I wonder what I would have gotten out of it if I had read it all the way through back then. But reading it now, its richness was a pleasant surprise, and it is well-deserving of Classic status not just due to age but because of its quality. Now, I appreciate the many layers to this book, and the invitation to consider its themes of race, gender, sexuality, power, and conformity. A remarkable exploration of what it's like to be a kind of person society tries to erase. 

By reading it now, I got to connect with the PNW setting, and understand the implications of the various places mentioned. The Native narrator, albeit written by a white man, brings in some exploration of treaties, land rights, and the generational trauma of displacement. This piece is a great companion read to contextualize that aspect of the book: https://commonplace.online/article/ken-kesey-meets-lewis-and-clark/

Many summaries describe Nurse Ratched as the ultimate villain. And while she is the primary adversary, this ignores the whole point that she is only the local arm of the "combine," the societal machine that enforces conformity and compliance. If Professor Umbridge is the evil middle-aged jailer of our (millenial) generation, Nurse Ratched was her literary ancestor. But where the professor is pure evil and as such wholly unsympathetic, the cracks in the nurse's facade, the pain we know shaped her, makes her human. You may not root for her, but at least you understand her.
I felt pain when she was exposed at the end, the gendered violence, but it fit the book.
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