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Yehoshua King

5/5/15

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The 281 page novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is written in the first person by
Ken Kesey and is set in a mental hospital in the Pacific Northwest during the 1960s
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The Chief
hallucinates as he relates what takes place in the mental hospital, but he knows he is not seeing
things correctly
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It’s hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it
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Because he is delusional, he may not be such a
trustworthy narrator
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One night when the Chief
refrains from taking his sleeping pill, he has a hallucination of one of the black aides pressing a
button and the entire dorm rolling under the ground
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The Chief is pulled out of
his reverie by Mr
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The next
morning, we find out that Blastic actually died in the middle of the night, so there may be some
truth to the Chief’s visions
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She needs everything to turn out her way so she can
have complete power and dominance over everyone
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Randle P
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McMurphy enjoys gambling, flirting with girls, taking risks and participating in brawls
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He is scared of the
three black aides who assist Nurse Ratched because they take advantage of him, even though
he is six feet six or seven inches tall
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The
aides call him Chief Broom because they force him to sweep the halls of the ward
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This act started when people
ignored him, causing him to feel invisible
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When someone is broken, the combine fixes him by sending
him to the hospital for repair
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The chief
says, “So she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and
she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way
you smell a motor pulling too big a load” (5)
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Nurse Ratched masks herself and her sexuality behind a strict, denigrating facade
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Harding says about Nurse Ratched’s power, “We are victims of a matriarchy
here” (59)
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When her patients refuse to listen to her, she will use any
methods necessary in order to control how they act, sometimes with brute force, such as the

electro shock therapy
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McMurphy arrives in the story when the Chief awakens in the day room after
succumbing to forced medical treatment and becoming unconscious
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This is the first laugh anyone in
the ward has heard in a long time
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In order to
escape the harsh work of the prison, he faked being a psychopath and was happily transferred
to the mental hospital
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He begins as the only
character to defy Nurse Ratched, but as the novel proceeds, he influences others to join him in
his disobedience and mischief
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The Chronics who can move around are called Walkers, and the rest are
either Wheelers or Vegetables
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When McMurphy first arrives at the ward, he checks out the day room
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Billy Bibbit directs
McMurphy to Dale Harding
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He voluntarily came to the hospital so that he can hide from the
prejudice of the world
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Nurse Ratched manipulates the Acutes to spy on each other
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Their reward for such disclosures is sleeping late the next
morning
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During the
meeting they discuss specific problems about certain patients
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McMurphy goes on to describe a “pecking party”, as a bunch of chickens who spot a speck of
blood on one another, and then start pecking at each other getting all bloody and tearing each
other apart, until they are all killed
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McMurphy’s raging ego is his killer flaw
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At first, things seem to be going well for
McMurphy until the lifeguard, also a patient of the ward, relays to McMurphy that patients can
only leave when Nurse Ratched allows them to
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Charles Cheswick, a guy who talks but does not act, is the first patient to follow
McMurphy’s behavior
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This causes
Cheswick to commit suicide in the pool
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Another example of McMurphy’s rebelliousness is when McMurphy wants to watch the
Word Series on TV during their cleaning time
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The vote proceeds in his favor and all the
patients sit in front of the TV instead of cleaning
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This causes Nurse Ratched to lose
her composure and scream at the patients, resulting in McMurphy winning his bet from earlier
on
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McMurphy smiles at first and then
later punches his hand through the glass in the Nurses’ Station
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Later, McMurphy requests to leave the ward with a prostitute he knows from Portland, Candy
Starr
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McMurphy requests a pass to go on a fishing trip with nine other patients, accompanied
by his two aunts
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While

the patients are signing up for the trip, Nurse Ratched pins newspaper clippings about
dangerous weather and boat wrecks on the bulletin board
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In the end, McMurphy convinces the Chief to come along on the
trip by offering to pay for his fishing trip fee if he promises to get strong enough to lift the
control panel in the tub room
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The next day McMurphy convinces George Sorenson, an OCD
patient who used to be a fisherman, to come with them as the captain
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During a Group Meeting, when McMurphy has to leave because of a phone call, Nurse
Ratched says that everything he does is for himself only
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Harding convinces
everyone that McMurphy never hid his gambling tricks from them anyway and that he does not
have bad intentions
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George has a phobia of soap and begs the aides not to wash him
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Nurse Ratched sends
them to the disturbed ward where they receive EST
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Mr
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Most of the patients join in
and have a party in the ward
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They plan to escape the next day, but they oversleep
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While talking to Nurse Ratched,
Billy Bibbit regains his confidence and talks without a stutter until Nurse Ratched threatens to
call his mother and he begins to stutter once again
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Nurse Ratched blames Billy Bibbit’s
death on McMurphy
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After this, most of the patients leave or transfer to a different ward
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Nurse Ratched
returns a week later with a bandage on her neck
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When he returns he is a vegetable, and the Chief smothers him so that he will not have to
suffer the rest of his life in the hospital, trapped in his own useless body
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He
hitches a ride with a Mexican to Canada to start a new life there
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McMurphy originally is sane and ends up as a
vegetable and is then killed
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Nurse Ratched’s power stems from her lack of sexuality and her manipulation over everyone
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McMurphy takes away her power when he exposes her body to everyone
showing her womanliness and then strangles her which temporarily disables her speech
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But he also is manipulative like Nurse Ratched because he gambles with everyone and takes
their money
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The fog in this novel represents the cloudy state of mind that Nurse Ratched puts the
patients in
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When McMurphy arrives, he pulls everyone out of the fog by helping them escape
Nurse Ratched’s manipulation
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In the hospital, Kesey served as an orderly and did experiments for the CIA
using psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs
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In Kesey’s days, the staff at the mental
hospitals treated patients terribly
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is a very interesting, thought-provoking novel
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When first read, it seems like Chief Bromden
is telling the story as it really is, but when analyzed more closely, the reader will realize that it is
not necessarily as it seems
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He is convinced that Nurse Ratched controls the fog to
confuse the patients to make sure there is never a rebellion
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I believe that Kesey
has helped form how psychiatric hospitals treat their patients today

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