Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

"Wire, briar, limber lock,
Three geese in a flock,
One flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo's nest."

Welcome back to the Asylum, I hope you're all having a great time bathing in the sunrays of spring. In such a nice weather, even the chance of recovery seems brighter and more realistic. Not so much the case for the inmates of the mental hospital in Ken Kesey's One flew over the cuckoo's nest. At least, not in the beginning..

The way in which this book is different from the earlier ones is that it is not about the actual process of going crazy. This novel is beyond that; the story takes place in a mental institute, in a "cuckoo's nest," and the characters are vegetating in the hopelessness of ever going back to the world of the sane. They are completely isolated from the outside world: instead of sunshine, they perceive fog, wrapping around their mind to keep it under lunacy; instead of caring doctors and nurses, they have the Big Nurse, Miss Ratched, who is terrorizing and manipulating everyone in the ward; instead of hope and humanity, they live in a machine-like state of life. However, when the new patient, Randle McMurphy arrives, things change. He detects right the first day the intolerable conditions of what's going on in the institution. Not letting the Big Nurse break him, he is doggedly striving to wake the other patients up from their slumber of half-death.

The impact of his endeavors can be most distinctly seen in the case of the narrator, from the perspective of whom the story is told, Chief Bromden. In the first half/two-third of the story, Bromden pretends to be deaf, as a result of which he is hardly present and serves only as an observer, as if he were half-dead. Nevertheless, thanks to McMurphy, he is gradually gaining his voice back and comes back to life.

The leading metaphor that pervades the whole novel is that of The Combine. Bromden identifies society as The Combine, a huge machine, that sends out impulses, controls everyone around, conquers and destroys humanity, and liquidates those who are not suitable for the outside world. It can also illustrate modernity with its mechanization, the USA itself annexating the land of his father, consumer's society. Anything that deprives social rejects and rebels of their rights in order to keep the machine working smoothly. This machine-like worldview appears also when the narrator describes Nurse Ratched as a huge truck that puffs out smoke and can't be stopped, and in his nightmare, in which people themselves are merely mechanical objects themselves and when stabbed, their bowels give out metal junk instead of blood.

Contrarily to this soullessness stands McMurphy's attitude towards the power of laughter. Even when he first appears, he shocks everyone with his loud guffaw because they hadn't heard that joyful voice for ages. One of the most touching scenes of the book relates to this motif as well; when several of the patients go fishing together with McMurphy, the ice finally breaks. The awkward situations and the ridiculous lack of competence caused them to burst out laughing; and that minute, they won. From that point, they are capable of laughing, by this driving the Big Nurse crazy and keeping themselves sane. They became human again.

Of course, they will still not be perfect, but McMurphy helps them realize that just because they can't fit in, it doesn't mean that they are insane. It's just "He who walks out of step hears another drum."