Ken Kesey Novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” Summary
The cult book of the American writer Ken Kesey was published in 1962 and is rightfully considered one of the best of the “flower children” era.
His influence on the worldview of an entire generation is difficult to overestimate. A year later, the novel was adapted for the theater. In 1975, the Oscar-winning film of the same name, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson, was released. At the beginning of the third millennium, Time included Kesey's most famous work in its list of the hundred best English-language works of the last century.
History[ | ]
The title of the book was the last line of a children's rhyme [1] (the last two lines are also included in the epigraph):
Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed, and apple thorn; Wire, brier, limber lock, Three geese in a flock, One flew east, one flew west,And one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Russian variant:
Do not blink.
Don’t yawn, don’t blink, The aunt is fishing for the chickens, The geese are flying across the sky... There are three geese in a whole flock... They are flying to different parts, Some from home, some to the house, Some over the cuckoo’s nest... The goose shouts to you: drive...Two-three, come out. translation by Andrey Sergeev
The novel was adapted for the stage by Dale Wasserman in 1963.
The famous 1975 film adaptation of the novel was criticized by Ken Kesey, in particular due to the fact that in the film the “narrator”, who in the novel is Chief Bromden, was relegated to the background.[ source not specified 825 days
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Time magazine included the novel in its list of the 100 best English-language works from 1923 to 2005.[2]
The novel was repeatedly subject to attempts to be banned in the United States of America, along with such works as “The Great Gatsby”, “Ulysses” and “The Catcher in the Rye”[3].
A very short retelling of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
The events described in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (this combination comes from a children's rhyme) take place in a psychiatric hospital in Salem in Oregon. The narrator is one of her patients, a tall Indian nicknamed the Leader. This character poses as a deaf-mute, which helps him to be a silent observer and analyst of the events taking place inside the establishment. The brightest character in the novel is the peculiar patient Randle McMurphy. He was transferred to a mental hospital from prison, and, most likely, is feigning a mental disorder in order to avoid hard labor. The other characters are presented by the author no longer as mentally ill people, but as normal people isolated from a deeply sick society.
List of characters and characteristics of the heroes of the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
The list of main characters in the book includes:
- Bromden, nicknamed the Leader , is a huge patient. Born in the union of a white woman and an Indian. He pretends to be deaf and dumb and weak-minded, escaping from the harsh American reality.
- Randle Patrick McMurphy is a freedom-loving guy who ended up in a mental hospital on the initiative of the prison authorities. A rebel by nature, a regular in prison, he served time in a colony. He tries to stir up the inert patients who have resigned themselves to their fate, tries to teach some of them, not the most hopeless, to enjoy life.
- Miss Gnusen is a nurse who enters into a moral battle with McMurphy. He is the personification of the soulless System. Her personal life did not work out, which manifests itself in despotism when communicating with patients.
Among the other heroes of the novel are the medical staff of the clinic and its inhabitants - Mr. Harding , Billy Bibbit , Cheswick and many others.
Summary of the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” in detail in parts
Part 1
The story is told from the perspective of a tall Indian, Bromden, nicknamed Chief. He is also called a “mop” because he has to constantly sweep the floor. Bromden's stay in a psychiatric hospital has been going on for more than a year, and he has made certain conclusions: the system of keeping sick and mentally unstable people in America does not help them, but disfigures and cripples them even more. Correction is carried out using a unique technique, with the help of which many patients return to normal life completely depressed and weak-willed.
Much in the institution changes when the cheerful Randle Patrick McMurphy, a shirtless guy, a tramp who managed to serve more than one sentence in prison, gets into it. McMurphy impressed the authorities of the colony where he had recently been staying as a psychopath, and they decided to put him in a mental hospital. Randle himself was only pleased with the turn in fate: he was going to have a fun time here, sit it out, and earn a little money playing card games with naive patients.
The medical staff is trying to flaunt their liberal principles. Allegedly, all problems that arise with patients are solved democratically. Meetings are held here, the opinion of almost everyone is carefully listened to, the administration conducts excursions around their establishment, demonstrating that the wards are well fed, and the staff is attentive to them. All problems are resolved by voting on the council, headed by Harding, a man with a higher education.
McMurphy immediately comes into conflict with the head nurse, Miss Gnusen. He, in the opinion of the strict lady, disrupts the measured life of the community, beats patients at cards, cynically ridicules meetings at which, under the control of an imperious woman, patients discuss the personal lives of certain patients. McMurphy encourages his comrades to escape by breaking the window and tearing the screen with a heavy remote control. In the heat of the moment, he bets that he may well be able to accomplish this. When the idea failed, Randle said he at least tried.
The television became a new stumbling block in the confrontation between McMurphy and Miss Vile. A man asks to disrupt his viewing schedule for the baseball championship. A vote is taken, and twenty of the forty people in the department are in favor of McMurphy's proposal. However, the sister explains: a majority of at least one vote is not enough to make a decision; she does not take into account the fact that the remaining twenty patients do not understand anything at all. The Leader belatedly raises his hand - that’s it, the meeting is declared closed. Then McMurphy voluntarily turns on the “box” and does not leave it even when Miss Gnusen unplugs the TV. He and his associates “watch” baseball on a blank screen.
Part 2
It took a little time for the doctors to be convinced that they would suffer with McMurphy; among themselves they call him “the disorder factor.” A proposal comes up to transfer the troubled patient to the violent ward, but Miss Gnusen does not allow it. The woman herself needs to morally break him, prove to everyone in the department that the ideological enemy is not a rebel hero at all, but just an egoist trying to achieve personal comfort.
Meanwhile, McMurphy's influence on other patients is growing. The leader notices that the “repressive machine” is malfunctioning. There has never been such a positive atmosphere in the department. However, Bromden soon witnesses how McMurphy's rebellious fervor gradually approaches zero. The thing is that Randle discovered a sad thing for himself: he ended up in a colony for a specific period of time, but he can stay in a mental hospital indefinitely. As the doctors decide, so it will be - his fate is in their hands. Therefore, he is careful in his statements and stops standing up for other patients in the department. But McMurphy’s rebellious spirit “moves” into a patient named Cheswick, who fights with his superiors for the right to smoke cigarettes at any time and in any quantity. Cheswick is sent to the department for violent people, and after returning from there he takes his own life.
McMurphy is shocked by this death, but he is even more amazed by the fact that most of the hospital's patients are not here under duress. He again enters into a fight with Miss Vile and encourages patients to actively express their feelings. McMurphy organizes a basketball tournament, putting together a team of patients against a team of orderlies. And although the psychos ultimately lose, they feel like people for a while. McMurphy soon realizes that the Chief is imitating a deaf-mute. The former prisoner tries to instill self-confidence in Bromden: the Indian, under the guidance of a friend, lifts the remote control higher and higher from the floor.
Part 3
One day, Randle McMurphy decides, instead of taking a bus ride around the city, to go with the whole squad to the sea on a boat to fish. Miss Gnusen's exhortations do not help; the patients are fired up with an exciting idea. The captain of the ship refuses to go to sea without accompanying papers, then the psychos led by McMurphy steal the boat and have a blast!
During the cruise, shy Billy Bibbit meets Candy, McMurphy's girlfriend. The guy really likes the girl. Understanding the feelings of Billy, who needs to assert himself as a man, McMurphy agrees with Candy that she will come to the mental hospital this coming Saturday and sleep with the timid young man.
Part 4
Before Saturday, McMurphy and the Chief get into a fight with the orderlies, which is why they end up in the violent ward and receive electric shocks. Randle returns to his comrades before the weekend and prepares to meet Candy with her friend Sandy and a supply of gifts.
A party with alcohol goes beyond what is permitted; the patients, led by McMurphy, destroy Miss Gnusen’s office. Realizing that the initiator of the pogrom and orgy is in trouble, the patients suggest that he hide. McMurphy agrees, but falls asleep from too much alcohol. When he comes to his senses, it becomes impossible to escape - orderlies appear in the department.
Miss Gnusen can hardly contain her rage at the sight of the chaos in the premises, and in addition, she does not find Billy Bibbit in the department. Soon the guy is discovered in a secluded place in the company of a girl. Miss Vile shames Billy and threatens to tell his mother everything, and she will deal with Billy's son properly. He is horrified by this prospect, makes excuses and shouts that he was forced to do this...
Unable to withstand the emotional stress, Billy cuts his throat. Miss Gnusen blames McMurphy for what happened, whom she considers to be involved in the suicides of both Cheswick and Billy. McMurphy attacks the hated woman and strangles her. The orderlies pull the brawler away from the nurse, and she barely comes to her senses.
Gradually, patients are discharged home or transferred to other departments. Only the regulars remain, among them Bromden. The leader witnesses McMurphy turn into a vegetable after being lobotomized. Bromden cannot allow such humiliation of his life-loving friend. He suffocates him with a pillow at night, after which he breaks the barred window with the remote control that McMurphy tried to lift and breaks free.
Ken Kesey. Novel "Over the Cuckoo's Nest"
One of the brightest postmodern texts of American literature of the 1960s, illustrating, in particular, the permeability of the boundaries between the two main postmodern movements (mega- and metafiction), and at the same time one of the milestones of US literature of the second half of the 20th century in general, was the novel by Ken Kesey ( 1935–2001) "Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962).
Kesey is a notorious figure in American literature. He was born in La Junta, Colorado, graduated from the University of Oregon, studied at Stanford University, but dropped out after becoming involved in a risky undertaking: as a voluntary (and paid) subject, he took part in experiments with LSD conducted as part of a scientific program research into the possibilities of using the drug in psychiatric practice. The program was soon closed by the government, but Kesey remained at the psychiatric hospital for another six months as an orderly and night watchman. From this experience grew the novel "Over the Cuckoo's Nest", bright, complex, technically perfect, absolutely original and incredibly relevant.
The merits of the book cannot be explained by any properties of the author’s creative individuality - none of the subsequent works, in which Kesey unsuccessfully imitated himself, even approximately corresponded to the artistic level of the first novel by a non-professional writer. It was as if the era itself, alarming, conflicting, contradictory, had just begun, chose this unremarkable young man as an exponent of its spirit. (Kesey, always prone to outrageousness, claimed that the entire novel was “dictated” to him while he was in a drug-induced trance).
K. Kesey's book became the “bible” of the 60s, its characters and author became heroes of the youth movement and counterculture. In a brightly painted bus, Kesey and a group of friends who called themselves “The Merry Pranksters” traveled around the United States, promoting freedom from any restrictions, went to prison for drug possession, and in the 70s settled down and settled - for the rest of his life - on his ranch . Despite the fact that Kesey wrote about a dozen books (“And sometimes you feel unbearable,” 1964; “The Sailor’s Song,” 1992; “The Last Circle,” 1994, etc.), he entered the history of American literature as the author of one work. The novel "Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was for the 60s what Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" was for the 50s: it opened people's eyes to what was happening to them.
The action takes place in the psychiatric ward of a Midwestern hospital, and the characters in the book are patients in the “psychiatric hospital.” It turns out, however, that they are not crazy at all. It’s just that these people, for various reasons, cannot adapt to life in society. One of them (Billy Bibbit) stutters and is painfully shy, the other (Harding) suffers from feelings of inferiority due to his wife's infidelity, etc. They are all “rabbits” and cannot stand up for themselves, and this world is “made for wolves,” as the “chief psycho” of the Harding department explains to newcomer McMurphy. They ended up in a mental hospital voluntarily. Moreover, they do not feign madness at all, but, strange people, they are so inconsistent with the healthy American way of life that society readily gets rid of them.
Upon closer reading, this in itself acute and unexpected situation takes a new turn, revealing a generalizing, allegorical plan for the narrative. The psychiatric clinic described in the novel is very modern, with soft chairs, television, radio, polite staff and a self-governing board of patients - this is a small model of a consumer society, of America in general. It is no coincidence that the patient and staff composition is ethnically and socially diverse. There are Indians, Americans of Swedish, Irish, and Scottish origin, dark-skinned orderlies, and one of the nurses is Japanese.
Among the patients there are old and young, people with a university degree (Harding) and no education at all (George the Washstand). They all enjoy the same rights: they are well fed, taken for walks and kept clean. Many of them are aware that their “free choice” is just an illusion of freedom, that their “self-government” is a fiction, that their life is a semblance of life. But this is the price to pay for comfort and lack of worries. An exorbitant payment, as it becomes clear in the course of the action, for here spiritual murder is committed daily and hourly. All non-standard, but living people gathered in the clinic are subjected to monstrous pressure, constant psychological treatment, the purpose of which is supposedly adaptation to the conditions of social life, but in reality - standardization and leveling of personality.
To level a person, you must first humiliate him, trample him, to which everything in the department is subordinated - the iron daily routine, the ever-rumbling radio, vigilant supervision of patients and group “therapeutic” discussions of the intimate aspects of the lives of each patient. Finally, this is served by the very threat of using radical means of “brain realignment” - electric shock and lobotomy. They are applied only to those who cannot be leveled and continue to “break out of the system,” such as the main character of the novel, McMurphy. All this is enough to keep people in a “rabbit” state. They become standard and easy to manage. This is what it is like, America in the early 60s, says the author. Look, Americans, and freeze in horror!
Salinger showed the first symptoms of the disease. Kesey made the final diagnosis and made a series of prescriptions. These “prescriptions” are associated with the image of R.P. McMurphy, a strong and reckless guy with a loud voice, red hair and a nose broken in a fight, a womanizer and joker. He was sent to the clinic for compulsory treatment. He is unconventional, but in a different way than the other patients on the ward. He is distinguished by complete emancipation, boundless optimism and “self-confidence.” He fundamentally does not want to obey the standard and does not want to put up with the fact that other people are humiliated and bullied before his eyes, and he begins to fight for a person’s right to be a person and not a robot.
The basis of the novel's plot is the ups and downs of McMurphy's struggle with Miss Gnusen, the all-powerful head nurse of the department, the embodiment of the system. The outcome of the struggle is tragic: seeing that McMurphy cannot be defeated, he is sent for a lobotomy. The physical death of the hero is perceived as his deliverance from the pitiful fate of a warning exhibit: this is what will happen to those who start a riot!
The book is written in a tragic and farcical tone. Incredibly funny in places and creepy in essence, it nevertheless does not leave a feeling of hopelessness. McMurphy still managed to defend his comrades as living people, to prove to them that protest was possible. One by one, the “voluntary” patients leave the clinic. The structure of the novel is open. It ends with the daring escape of the most faithful of McMurphy’s followers, the “forced old-timer” of the half-breed Indian section Bromden, on whose behalf the story is told. The main plot is somewhat complicated by lyrical digressions - passages of Bromden's memories of his Indian childhood and his past pre-hospital life, as well as passages of dreams and hallucinations; they, however, are very organic and do not interfere with the novel being read “in one breath.”
However, the relative simplicity of the novel is deceptive. This is a postmodern text, and it is literally replete with evangelical, transcendentalist, Freudian motifs and literary associations, which, with rare exceptions, never come to the surface, but give the book multidimensionality. Thus, McMurphy, who knew about his fate and accepted mortal torment for other people, is clearly associated with the Son of God Jesus Christ (the gospel plan of subtext is palpable in a number of scenes in the novel). The hero’s actions are based on Emerson’s principle of “self-confidence,” the most important in transcendental ethics, and Thoreau’s doctrine of “civil disobedience.”
However, the Freudian background of the novel is especially clear. Thus, McMurphy intuitively correctly understands the origins of the psychological sadism of the fifty-year-old spinster Miss Gnusen - this is compensation for the suppressed sexual instinct. True, the hero has not read either Freud or Jung, or, as he says, “is not familiar with the cabin boy Fred,” but the author is very familiar with them. And, for example, the incomparable, extremely lively and funny scene of fishing during a boat ride organized by McMurphy for the sick has an underlying symbolic meaning. While the hero and his girlfriend Candy, his girlfriend from the outside, are secluded in the cabin, the rest of the patients are enthusiastically fishing. Fish is a common Freudian symbol of love. (Sexual liberation was one of the points of the author’s program for improving society). The fishing scene is also significant in the gospel narrative. Fish is also an important Christian symbol. As is known, the image of a fish, and not a cross, marked the temples of the first Christians.
Among the literary associations are Shakespeare (the theme of imaginary madness, the image of George the washstand), E. Poe (the idea of the permeability of the boundaries between normality and pathology), Melville, S. Anderson. Thus, the world of the inhabitants of a madhouse is the situation of Anderson's Winesburg taken to the limit. Kesey's heroes are “grotesque heroes.” Moreover, they are grotesque even in appearance: the two-meter giant Chief Bromden, who has been pretending to be deaf and mute for many years, thirty-year-old Billy Bibbit, who looks like a big-eared boy, Harding, with his overly handsome face and nervous hands, which he is shy of (direct association with Anderson’s Wing Biddlebum from the novel “Hands”) ") and his manner of "wrapping himself in his own thin shoulders." All the other patients at the clinic are also grotesque.
To understand the author's intention, parallels with the American “super novel” “Moby Dick, or the White Whale” by the brilliant romantic writer G. Melville are very important. The signal for such a perception is given from the very first pages of the novel, at first in a comically reduced key. A whole pod of white whales frolics on the underpants of McMurphy, who has just been admitted to the hospital. The replicated image of the legendary Moby Dick is also a sign of the times, a product of modern mass culture. The chain of Melvillean associations can be traced quite clearly in the novel. Let us note only the key points of their meaning.
Thus, Miss Vile, with her complete callousness, lack of humanity and unlimited powers, is associated with the monstrous Moby Dick himself, the embodiment of incomprehensible forces beyond the control of man. It is not for nothing that the incredible whiteness of her uniform, hard with starch, her white face, her very light eyes “without depth” are constantly emphasized. This whiteness is perceived not as purity, but as a lack of color, indifference, coldness, deadness. This is the whiteness of Moby Dick, to which Kesey adds another aspect - sterility. Like Moby Dick, Miss Gnusen embodies something transpersonal, although more concrete - a militant social order, the idea of the complete leveling of human individuality.
For McMurphy, she is the focus of the world's evil - like the White Whale for Captain Ahab. And the desperate struggle between them is reminiscent of Ahab's struggle with Moby Dick: one of them must be destroyed. At the same time, from time to time the accents shift, and the ascetic fanatic Miss Gnusen begins to resemble Ahab, and McMurphy - the White Whale in its other meaning - spontaneity, naturalness and scale. The novel thus includes the idea of ambivalence between good and evil.
One more point is very important for understanding the author's intention. The ethnically diverse composition of the ward's patients is clearly associated with the multinational crew of the Pequod, Captain Ahab's ship, which, as we recall, served as Melville's model for the United States. Melville's associations seem to enlarge the scale of what is happening. In many ways, it is they who make us perceive the novel as a reflection on the fate of the nation and humanity, a warning about the danger that threatens them.
K. Kesey's book organically fit into the movement for “getting to the roots” that developed widely in the 1960s, along with other numerous movements of this turbulent decade. Thus, the criticism indicated the then surge of all-American interest in everything “Indian”, caused by the desire to support Native Americans in the fight for their civil rights. In literature, this movement manifested itself in increased attention to the “Indian theme”: to the ancient mythopoetic creativity of the original Americans and to the modern folklore of their reservations, to their inner world.
Various aspects of the “Indian theme” were developed in the prose of John Barth and Thomas Berger (“Little Big Man”, 1964), Truman Capote (“In Cold Blood”, 1965) and a number of other writers, in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Denise Levertov and many others . In K. Kesey's novel “Over the Cuckoo's Nest” this topic appeared from an unusual and poignant perspective, and the image of a Native American turned out to be especially impressive.
Kesey's book, like a kind of concentrating mirror, not only reflected and sharpened the problem of Native Americans, but also showed it as the focus of all the pressing problems of America, which entered the second half of the 20th century. In “Cuckoo’s Nest,” this problem in all its modern complexity manifests itself in a literal sense: the story is told from the perspective of the half-breed Indian “Chief” Bromden, a shell-shocked World War II veteran and a long-time patient in the psychiatric ward. The leader - the hero-narrator and interpreter of all events - appears here as a bright and complex individual.
The author deeply and subtly explores the “Indian” characteristics of his mental makeup. Along with the difficult ethnic and military experience, the ancient memory of his ancestors lives in Bromden; he acts as a bearer of the folklore tradition of Native Americans, their mythopoetic thinking, their flexible and wise perception of the world. As it turns out, the blood of leaders does indeed flow in Bromden. His father “was a purebred Colombian Indian—a chief—hard and shiny as a rifle butt.” Although the hero is only half Indian, but, brought up surrounded by native Americans, he himself feels like one. And his point of view is that of an Indian.
The mythopoetic thinking of Native Americans recognizes the reality of the existence of an additional, spiritual dimension, the presence of other worlds along with the objective and material world. The boundaries of the latter seem permeable to this thinking, which opens up the possibility of traveling to “other worlds.”
Such travels, in essence, are Bromden’s memories of his childhood and youth, which he experiences as reality. The leader resorts to them when it becomes unbearable for him to endure hospital everyday life. This idea of Indian mythopoetics is surprisingly accurately illustrated by the episode of Bromden’s “journey” to a painting hanging in the department.
Bromden’s dreams are also reality, this is a terrible “other world”, which he visits against his will. It is no coincidence that the hero dreams of a nightmare with bodies suspended on hooks and Blastiq dismembered into pieces on the very night that Blastiq dies. The spiritual world (dream, memory, the true essence of people) is the same reality for him as the material world, because he is an Indian. He was locked in a “psychiatric hospital” and is being treated precisely because he does not separate reality from his “hallucinations”. It turns out that they are treating him for the fact that he is an Indian, they are treating him for the thousand-year-old spiritual culture of his ancient people, wanting to adapt him to the standard of modern American civilization.
Of course, Bromden’s spiritual harmony is disturbed; it’s not for nothing that he “shies away from his own shadow” and feels “small.” Surprisingly, however, this is not the case. On the contrary, it is surprising that in the sterile hospital hell, after 200 electroshock sessions, he retained his poetic Indian worldview, his living soul.
Having created a living, reliable and vivid image of Chief Bromden, forcing the reader to get used to his complex inner world, Kesey thereby, as it were, released the Indian from the captivity of literary tradition and philistine stereotypes - into living, not book life.
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