Colegiul National Mihai Viteazu Slobozia

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST

AUTHOR: DIACONESCU SILVIA

TEACHER: CIUREA KARIN

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One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest

In the 1950s, American literature witnessed a new cultural movement, initiated by a group of writers, known as The Beat generation. Representatives, as Allen Ginsberg , William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac , were against traditional writing, prudery of their parents generation and social equality. They were promoting drugs, alternative sexuality and nonconformity, values which have reflected in a more opened, honest and straightforward literature. Towards 1960s, The Beat movement transformed gradually in the Hippie culture. During this period of transition between beat and hippie, was written Ken Keseys novel, One flew over the cuckoos nest. As he considers himself, Ken Kesey represents a link between the two cultures of that moment, too old to be a beatnik, too young to be a hippie. Ken Kesey was born in 1935 in Colorado, to dairy farmers parents. In his youth, he was a talented wrestler, a voracious reader and filmgoer and also highly-interested in magic and hypnotism. At the age of 25, he graduated from the University of Oregon and won a fellowship to a creative writing program at Stanford University. While he was attending the program, he enrolled as a volunteer in a hospital, where he helped at studying and testing the new drugs effects. The experience that he gathered during his volunteer work at the hospital, which included tests on hallucinogenic drugs and also frequent talks with the patients, inspired him to write the novel One flew over cuckoos nest. The novel strikes by its originality and the allegorical metaphor on which it is built. Kesey treats themes like the false general opinion about insanity, the expression of sexuality, oppressive society of 1950s and societys destruction of natural impulses. Despite being controversial when it was published, as it is a protest, counterculture and allegorical novel, One flew over the cuckoos nest had a great and instant success to the public. One of the most contentious subjects was Keseys belief that the insanity is wrongly regarded and insane people are just victims of an iniquitous system which declines and pushes out anyone who doesnt follow the conventional ideas of behaving. In the book, Kesey emphasizes the difficulty to differentiate the ill and normal considered characters. While a mentally insane person is not able to adapt the rules of the society, the normal one loses his independence and act like a puppet.

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The story is told by Chief Bromden, a half-Indian who had been patient at Oregon psychiatric hospital for ten years. His paranoia is evident from the first lines of the book, and he also suffers from hallucinations and delusions. Bromdens world view is dominated by his fear of what he calls the Combine, a huge conglomeration that controls society and forces people into conformity. Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb and tries to go unnoticed, even though he is incredibly tall and well-built. The hospital is ruled by Nurse Ratched, who seems to control everything, starting with the patients and ending with the hospital staff, including the manager. She runs the hospital in a heavy-handed, authoritarian manner, with mechanical precision. In the daily meetings, she encourages patients to attack and accuse each other and, if anybody rebels against anything, he is sent to electroshock treatments. Patients life continues in this army conditions until one day, when a new patient arrives. Randle McMurphy will be the person who tries to change the life in the hospital. Bromden himself notices that there is something different about the new mate. Randle McMurphy will never become the slave of Nurse Ratcheds rules. He makes a bet with the other patients that he can determine Ms Ratched to lose her temper. There will be an undeclared war between the nurse and McMurphy. As Randle obtains more and more little victories, the patients start to gather the confidence that even them can oppose Mrs. Ratched. They recover their courage to take personal decisions, their strengths and confidence that they can return into public and into society again. Chief Bromden, narrates not only the story about the hospital, and her, and the guysand about McMurphy, as he declares at the beginning- , but also the story of his own journey toward sanity. When the novel begins, Bromden is paranoid, bullied, and often surrounded by a hallucinating fog which signifies both his medicated state and his desire to hide from reality. Moreover, he believes that he is extremely weak, even though he has a strong body. As long as he believes it, he will always be weak. By the end of the novel, the fog has cleared, and Bromden has recovered the personal strength to escape from the hospital. Everyone believes that he is deaf and dumb. When McMurphy begins to pull him out of the fog, he realizes the source of his charade: it wasnt me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all. Randle McMurphy represents confidence, sexuality, freedom, and selfdetermination. Through Chief Bromdens narration, the novel establishes

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that McMurphy is not, in fact, crazy, but rather that he is trying to manipulate the system to his advantage. His trajectory through the novel is the opposite of Bromdens: he starts being sane and powerful but ends as a helpless vegetable, having sacrificed himself for the benefit of all the patients. That is way McMurphy becomes a Christ figure. This idea is firstly suggested by the fact that McMurphy takes a shower before coming in the ward, the water being a symbol of baptism. Secondly, when he takes the patients fishing, he is like Christ leading his twelve disciples to the sea to test their faith. Finally, McMurphys ultimate sacrifice, his attack on Ratched, as well as the symbolism of the cross-shaped electroshock table cements the image of the Christ-like martyr that McMurphy has achieved by sacrificing his freedom and sanity. Nurse Ratched represents the oppressive mechanization, dehumanization of modern societyin Bromdens words, the Combine. Bromden describes Ratched as being like a machine. She has complete control over every aspect of the ward, as well as almost complete control over her own emotions. She maintains her power by manipulating the others weaknesses and by dividing and conquering her patients. McMurphy manages to ruffle Ratched because he plays her game: he picks up on her weak spots right away. When McMurphy rips her shirt open at the end of the novel, he symbolically exposes her hypocrisy and deceit, and she is never able to regain power. Nurse Ratched embodies the Antichrist, conformity, authority, evil, and death while McMurphy symbolizes freedom. Besides the thrilling, fast-moving action, the excitement aroused by the characters rebellion against conformity, the book hides a wicked parable of the society. The novel makes you laugh and makes you cry, makes you think and reflect on our world and on how much a human must do to find himself. Considering these aspects and many others that each of us will discover in this admirable novel, I definitely think that One over the cuckoos nest deserves to be read.

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Bibliography

KAPPEL, LAWRENCE, ed. Readings on ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST

Kesey, Ken, ed. Penguin Classics, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest