One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey

About 3 pages (980 words)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (novel) Summary

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Ken Kesey's first and best known novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), the story of an unlikely redeemer who triumphs over the authoritarian "Combine" run by Big Nurse Ratched, became the credo of an entire generation of rebels; and in the late twentieth century it continues to command the interest of new generations of readers with its comedic virtuosity.

The novel's genesis seems to confirm Kesey's belief that life is a form of art. As a graduate student at Stanford University in the late 1950s, Kesey learned from a fellow student about experiments with "psychomimetic" drugs at the Veteran's Hospital in Menlo Park and volunteered to be a paid subject. Kesey—by his own admission in Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) "a jock, never even been drunk but that one night in my frat house before my wedding"—began taking government-administered LSD and other hallucinogens. When the original drug experiments ended, Kesey accepted a job as night attendant on the psychiatric unit at Menlo Park, where his access to the patients' medicines and the long stretches of time between ward checks led him to abandon his novel-in-progress about San Francis-co's North Beach and to undertake a new work, about the plight of asylum inmates who defiantly assert their humanity against overwhelming forces.

Kesey claimed that peyote was the inspiration for the character of Chief Bromden, whose highly subjective and often hallucinatory first-person narration gives Cuckoo's Nest its metaphoric richness, its peculiar horror, and ultimately its emotional force. Chief, a hulking giant who survived not only the horrors of World War II but also the asylum's 200 or more electroshock therapy treatments, has been emasculated and dehumanized by Big Nurse and the "Combine." Reduced to an object of ridicule by the orderlies, who call him Chief Broom, Chief withdraws into a voluntary muteness. Only with the help of the newly admitted con man Randle Patrick ("Mack") McMurphy, who draws all of the inmates into his game of wits with Big Nurse, is Chief able to find his way back from "the fog," rediscover his manhood, and ultimately escape the hospital's confines to return to the world of nature he left behind.

McMurphy is like the Grail Knight who restores life to the wasteland: his eccentric behavior brings laughter back to the ward and serves as a liberating counter-therapy to Ratched's regimen of silence and fear, just as the friendly touch of his big hand, the opposite of Ratched's icy mothering, helps the men to regain their potency. In the asylum and on a day-long fishing trip, Mack forces them to appreciate the importance of solidarity and to exercise their new strength. Ratched, of course, recognizes the radical threat to her authority that McMurphy poses; in an act of symbolic castration, she arranges to have him lobotomized. But McMurphy's self-sacrifice only further empowers the inmates, who rebel against her tyranny and who ultimately break out—or sign themselves out—of the hospital, leaving her powerless over them.

Recognizing the tremendous cinematic potential of such a popular novel, actor Kirk Douglas bought the rights from Kesey in 1962 for $18,000. Douglas, who had played McMurphy in Dale Wasserman's theatrical adaptation of Cuckoo's Nest (which ran briefly and unsuccessfully in late 1963 at the Cort Theatre in New York), originally intended to recreate the role on film himself. After numerous delays, however, he turned the rights over to his son, Michael Douglas, who co-produced the film with Saul Zaentz in 1975. Directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson asMcMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Ratched, with Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit), Sydney Lassick (Cheswick), Scatman Crothers (Turkle), and Danny DeVito (Martini) in supporting roles, the film proved to be a commercial and critical success, sweeping all four of the major Academy Awards—best picture, best director, best actor, and best actress—as well as the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from another medium (remarkably, it was the first film since It Happened One Night [1934] to win the "Big Four" awards.)

Jack Nicholson, sitting on Josip Elic's shoulders, and Will Sampson in a scene from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Kesey, originally hired to write the screenplay and then fired, successfully sued over the use of his name in the final version. Kesey was particularly displeased with the handling of the character of Chief: unlike the producers, who wanted a realistic depiction of institutional life (even to the point of casting a real psychiatrist as Dr. Spivey and several inmates as patients in minor roles), Kesey felt that the film needed Bromden's hallucinatory point-of-view. Indeed, contrary to Kesey's vision, the film's Bromden (Will Sampson) appears as a figure of lesser importance than McMurphy, and the Combine is never mentioned at all. Similarly, on film Ratched is far less monstrous than her counterpart in the novel; an attractive woman (albeit with a hairstyle suggesting two devil's horns) who is contemporary in age to McMurphy, she loses much of her mythic stature and at times seems more misguided than malicious and machine-like.

Forman's departures from the novel, however, are often as artistic as they are original. By moving some of the novel's ward scenes outdoors, he establishes a keen visual contrast between the claustrophobia of the institution and the freedom just beyond its walls. And his recurring use of windows, including the dark television set that reflects the inmates' mounting insubordination, heightens the impact of Chief's escape at the film's end. Above all, Nicholson's brilliant depiction of McMurphy brings Kesey's manic, mythic hero to life.