Review by clevermird - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

clevermird 's review for:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

2.5

challenging dark reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I didn’t really know much about this book going in. The movie adaptation is relatively famous, with Nurse Ratched and the general plot enough of a part of popular culture that I was aware of them, but I’ve never seen the movie and had no idea what (if any) differences there were in the book.

A Native American man known mainly as Chief Bromden or simply Chief is a long-term resident of a mental ward in Oregon. Plagued by delusions of a group of techno-overlords known as the Combine that want to fill him and the other patients with machinery to control them, he has lapsed into permanent silence and is content to let the residents and staff think he’s deaf. One day, however, the ward receives a new patient, the headstrong Randle McMurphy, who it’s soon revealed is faking insanity to get out of a prison sentence. McMurphy’s efforts to liven up the place soon clash with the cruel Big Nurse who runs the place and prompt the rest of the men in the ward to see their lives differently.

The first thing that sticks out about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the prose. The book is written in a loose, naturalistic 1st-person narration meant to get us right into Chief’s head. Due to his unusual thought processes and frequent hallucinations, this can be disorienting, but once I got used to it, I found it one of the book’s strongest features. The way the style shifts over the course of the story is a subtle but important characterization tool that I thought was masterfully done.

Several of the characters are also highly memorable, with Big Nurse (aka Nurse Ratched) being a perfect distillation of cruel healthcare workers that makes it obvious why she has such a place in pop culture and McMurphy and Chief both having layers to their characters that make them interesting to watch.

Unfortunately, two things hold back the book from the greatness it could have achieved.

The first of these is the pacing. It takes a very long time for things to start happening and the first half of the book is extremely repetitive, with events and many side characters blending into each other. Perhaps this is an intentional attempt to illustrate the atmosphere Chief lives in on the ward, but it was nonetheless frustrating. Eventually, things start happening at about the 2/3 mark, but by that point, Kesey seems to be running out of space and the last segment of the book feels somewhat rushed to make up for the earlier sluggishness.

More frustrating, however, is the messaging of the book. On its surface, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about the abuses of the mental health system in the 1960s and it works quite well as that. I think few would quibble with the notion that using asylums as a place to dump “troublesome” relatives is wrong, or that the way many medical facilities are and were structured opens the door to abuse by bad actors on the staff.

Digging a bit deeper, however, it’s clear that Kesey is also trying to address deeper themes about society. Chief’s hallucinations, for example, are very clearly tied to his experiences with watching his father be forced out of his home by the government as a child and the prejudice he has experienced throughout his life. Although the men in the ward all suffer from genuine mental health issues, the story posits that just as many of their problems are caused by “the man” and the way that life has tried to force them into a box. It’s only when they can loosen up and start enjoying the small things in life that they can start to look past their own hang-ups and begin to heal.

On the surface, I have no issue with this messaging – it can be taken too far for certain, but as a baseline it’s hardly objectionable. Where the book really started to lose me was when it began to draw connections between “the problems with society” and “women and minorities”. It’s subtle, at first, but after a while, I began to realize that all of the Black characters in the story are reduced to minions of the oppressive environment, sometimes able to be tricked or bribed, but never a positive force within the narrative. The female staff of the hospital is either ineffectual or evil as well, and the value of the various female characters within the story is directly tied to how well they can be sexualized. It’s notable that “overbearing female figures” show up regularly as antagonists, while the only women that the story presents in an unambiguously positive light are the two prostitutes, who are sexually available and generally follow McMurphy’s lead. These two women are given loving descriptions of their bodies while the evil female characters all have time devoted to how unattractive or “unwomanly” they look.

Perhaps this was all unintentional on Kesey’s part, but it definitely gave my reading an uncomfortable overtone and spoiled a lot of the enjoyment I could have gotten out of it. While it’s not worthless as literature, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest wasn’t nearly as profound or enjoyable as I’d hoped and I’d only recommend it to those already strongly interested.

Content Warnings