One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from 1975. You know it stars Jack Nicholson as a sane person in a 1960s asylum. You know calling someone “Nurse Ratched” means they are a terrible person. And you know her ward is not the kind of place you want to spend an extended period of time.

And if you’re like me, you haven’t seen the movie, and that really is all you know about the story. I knew this would be a controversial book but as is my policy with the books on my reading list, I had no idea what else the book was about. I like it best that way so I can read the book with an open mind and free of misconceptions.

I expected this book to be harsh. I expected a messed-up group of people trying to make it in a messed-up world. I didn’t expect psychological torture, lobotomies, and men treated like children so long they started acting like them.

In a nutshell, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about a man who for unknown reasons has been living in an Oregon insane asylum, and feels obliged to share about a man named McMurphy who came to the ward to get out of work  and ruined his life in the process. He even says at the beginning of the book, before he starts his tale, that “you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is to awful to be the truth…but it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” Which brings me to what ran through my mind for the majority of the book: Can I trust this guy? He’s been committed for years, is he a reliable narrator or do I take what he says with a grain of salt? We learn that he’s been pretending to be deaf and mute for years and this invisibility has caused people to say things in front of him they wouldn’t otherwise. This gives him a little more credibility – he knows much more than he’s letting on – but he’s also convinced that there are mechanical listening devices in the walls, so there’s that.

The main character is not the narrator but McMurphy, played by Nicholson in the movie. He comes to the ward sane – with a complicated past, like a lot of men, but still sane. He’s an outgoing and rebellious man who tries to give the sheltered men he’s living with a taste of dignity and life on the outside. Nurse Ratched doesn’t like him meddling with the emasculation of the men on her floor and makes it her personal vendetta to bring McMurphy into submission as well.When punishment doesn't work she turns to psychological assault, which works on most of her men. When that doesn't work she sends him for electrical shot treatments - and when he refuses to succomb to her after that she forces him to be lobotomized. By the end of the novel he has completely transformed from a rambunctious man's-man to a sad vegetable of a human being. The narrator's introduction was correct: it does seem to awful to be true. 

According to IMDb, the tagline of the film when it came out was "If he's crazy, what does that make you?" - which is a really good question. McMurphy wasn't crazy, but was nearly forced into madness just for being insubordinate. This novel is a disturbingly telling story of what can happen to a person's personality when it runs out of control. I'm not surprised that this novel is considered brilliant or that the film adaptation is a classic.