Review: Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
by Miles Raymer
Any novel should be cut a little slack to adjust for the historical context in which it was written. Even knowing this, I failed utterly in my attempt to give Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest a fair reading. Try as I might, I couldn’t dispense with my modern viewpoint enough to enjoy Kesey’s classic, so instead spent nearly three hundred pages cursing the author and his insufferable protagonist, Randle McMurphy. To me, this book is little more than an obsolete relic from a sad and ignorant time.
The one upshot of Cuckoo’s Nest is Chief Bromden, the book’s narrator. Tall and powerful, Bromden is the mixed raced son of a Native American man and a white woman. Bromden is committed to an asylum in Oregon, where all the other inhabitants think he is deaf and dumb (he’s not). The story comes to us through Bromden’s internal monologue, with an interesting mixture of reliable detail and questionable suppositions. Bromden is prone to hallucinations, and often feels engulfed by a “fog”: “You could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself” (117).
Bromden introduces us to the other committed men in the asylum, as well as their caregivers: a steely nurse named Ratched and her African American aides. Life in the asylum is generally lousy; Ratched runs the place with an iron fist, playing perverse power games with the ineffectual patients and routinely subjecting them to various “treatments,” which range from mild to torturous.
The routines of this strange world are interrupted by the arrival of McMurphy, a newly-committed and outspoken “psychopath.” Kesey is determined to present McMurphy as his novel’s hero–– “a giant come out of the sky to save us,” as Bromden puts it––but McMurphy’s no hero (224). Nor, I would argue, is he a flawed but lovable antihero. He’s a racist, sexist, impetuous, lecherous gambler high on his own arrogance––just the kind of scumbag that white male writers could get away with lionizing in the 1960s.
McMurphy wastes no time making friends with the asylum’s patients and flouting the staff’s authority. On the whole, he treats the patients better than the caregivers do, but also constantly swindles them out of money. He fairly points out some of Nurse Ratched’s unfair practices, but cannot do so without dehumanizing her and her aides. For some inexplicable reason, McMurphy and the patients constantly bring up the idea that Ratched’s breasts are “too big” for her body. And the mere fact that the aides are black seems justification enough for McMurphy to treat them like garbage. Ratched and her aides are no angels, but they’re not the only parties guilty of shortsightedness and cruelty.
Most insidious are the book’s two climatic moments, which both involve McMurphy attacking the asylum’s staff. In the first, McMurphy defends another patient from an invasive examination by picking a fight with one of the aides. He announces his anger by calling the man a “Goddamned coon” and a “Goddamned motherfucking nigger” (229). The former insult has been dropping from McMurphy’s mouth the entire novel, but the latter makes its first and only appearance in this scene, creating a chilling link between the invocation of America’s most repugnant slur and “white heroism.” The only way to right the wrongs of the asylum, it would seem, is to crush black bodies, and that’s what McMurphy does. Later, when McMurphy finally tries to kill Nurse Ratched, he tears her clothes off first, revealing her body to the ward and humiliating her even as he tries to take her life.
Now, within the tiny universe of this book, I understand how McMurphy could be seen as a hero. Ratched and her minions are indeed unsavory creatures whose sins are repellent by any standard. It’s nice to see someone standing up for the hapless patients. It makes us feel righteous, as I’m sure Kesey felt while writing.
But here’s the problem: the moment you step outside the four walls of this world and into the shitstorm of American history, Cuckcoo’s Nest becomes darkly farcical in ways Kesey clearly did not intend. Here we have a strong, virile white guy with a big mouth, and his “oppressors” are…a disproportionately-endowed white woman and her black assistants? This is ludicrous. I’m not the kind of person who believes it’s impossible for a member of an oppressed class to become an oppressor, but I also don’t believe modern readers should give situations like this a pass just because it was “a different time.”
One might argue that Cuckoo’s Nest is less about sexism and racism and more about power, which has a long history of being abused in mental hospitals. Very well. But why, then, must our antagonists be female and black? Why must McMurphy constantly ridicule their appearance, giving the impression that there is nothing under the skin? The answer, I think, is that there’s no good reason at all why these things have to be the way they are. They reveal Kesey’s privileged myopia, his selective empathy for “disenfranchised” white men that doesn’t apply equally to women living in cultures where they have no real power, or to similarly powerless black men who work in asylums because it might be the best job they’ll ever have.
When we take a closer look, we find that the very qualities that are supposed to make McMurphy appealing––his good ol’ boy quips, his uncompromising demeanor, his readiness to laugh things off––signify the inheritance of centuries of white male supremacy. If we fail to question its legitimacy, we tacitly concur that McMurphy is entitled to this inheritance, which bestows on him the “right” to express himself without restraint, regardless of context. To fall under McMurphy’s spell is to ignore the most shameful trespasses of American history. People may not have thought so in 1962, but I think so now.
Rating: 2/10
It’s like the apocryphal Malcolm X line that Spike Lee put in the movie: a white woman who has just heard X speak walks up to him as he’s leaving and asks what she can do to help the movement and he pointedly says, “Absolutely nothing.”
McMurphy is not anyone’s hero. Even if he had the best of intentions and beliefs—which Kesey by choice did not give him—he could not be the hero that everyone in the book needed. So why were they looking to him? Why are you as a reader. He’s just not. Kesey could have made him sympathetic if he had intended him to be even an anti-hero, but I believe he had no such intention. He was being more subversive than that. Kesey himself write in the demise of the mind of his non-hero. He doesn’t have him die, he has his mind erased. I think he thought of that as the only possible justice. I don’t think Kesey believes in the existence of heroes. If you relate to or are drawn into the character of
McMurphy I think Kesey would want you’re mind erased as well.
There’s much more to say about the sexism and racism in Cuckoo’s Nest and about writing and art itself as a subversive, political, manipulation, but we can talk later. Yes, please, let’s do that, neighbor.
Hey Mike. Thanks a lot for this comment, and for reading the review. I think you’re right that McMurphy isn’t supposed to be a hero. I think my reading of the book was probably tainted by the fact that I’ve seen the movie, in which I remember McMurphy feeling very much like a hero (to my teenage self, anyhow). It was perhaps unfair to expect the same thing from the book.
I would push back a bit and say that, at least from Bromden’s point of view, McMurphy is considered at least somewhat heroic. I also think that the ending is clearly intended to be tragic, but that the tragedy is pretty toothless if we don’t lament the loss of McMurphy’s mind (which I don’t). That doesn’t mean Kesey saw McMurphy as a hero though, so perhaps my critiques of his authorial viewpoint go too far.
Thanks for adding your perspective.
Miles,
I really want to say that you made me pause. Ken Kesey was my hero in high school, both McMurphy Hank Sampter were men I thought well of. So when you said:
“He’s (McMurphy) a racist, sexist, impetuous, lecherous gambler high on his own arrogance––just the kind of scumbag that white male writers could get away with lionizing in the 1960s.”
you really made me think. What clouds my vision today? Thanks for your thoughtful review. I just hate to say that you are on to something important for my generation to consider.
Mike Schock
Hey Mike! Thanks for reading! It’s always a pleasure to hear that I made someone pause. My reaction to this book was both very strong and very biased toward my particular modern perspective. I certainly don’t think it’s a very objective assessment, but it’s a sincere representation of how I reacted to the book.
There are always many things clouding our vision, and reading is one of the best ways to see past the ideological and physical surfaces that we take for granted. If I helped you do that in any way, I’m grateful.
My problem with Kesey is the absolute mess he has made of the mental health of North Americans. The vast numbers of drug deranged homeless living in tents amid absolute filth and a rising tide of medieval diseases and rats is a testament to the underlying philosophy preached in Cuckoo’s Nest. It appears that Neil Cassidy was the inspiration for McMurphy, a car thief and speed freak who was himself tormented by the need to play the drug addled, gesticulating and babbling clown to support himself in the Pranksters, a drug cult Kesey financed with his own wealth. (Neil died of heart failure trying to count the railroad ties between two towns after someone made that challenge in a bar. His dying words were “64,928” when they found him lying on the tracks) The mass popularization of powerful psychoactive drugs that has driven people to insanity and homelessness and crime, is to a very large degree Kesey’s greatest work. There are You
Tube speeches by Ken where he heaps scatalogical abuse on Tom Wolfe for the Electric Koolaid Acid Test while he praises Hunter S Thompson. No doubt he’s upset at the less than idyllic portrait Wolfe painted of him and his callous disregard for the psychological casualties left behind by his philosophy about taking hallucinogens recreationally or even therapeutically . Few people stop to consider the mystery behind the famous “Acid Tests” which the Merry Prankster’s staged, mostly around San Francisco. They handed out huge amounts of free LSD to anyone and everyone for several years. Dave McGowan’s work on this is not as professional or academic as I would like it to be but he does raise some important questions. At that time the raw materials for LSD were very expensive and required a fairly sophisticated laboratory to produce large amounts. McGowan estimates that the Pranksters were handing out $60,000.00 worth of LSD a week for free at one point. Where did the money come from? McGowan’s thesis is that it was all a psyops financed by US Naval Intelligence to distract the youth engaged in the Berkeley Anti War movement, a movement that was becoming very powerful and effective on several fronts. Kesey’s own espoused attitude to that movement was that everyone should just turn their backs on politics, walk away and say “fuck it” which a lot of people did in the confusion that LSD induces. There’s a lot of other problems to be explored with Ken; he made close ties with the Hells Angels and many feel he introduced them to the vast potential for wealth and power to be had by drug dealing which they have today attained. Ken has a left a lot of ruined lives in his path but there’s no sign that he ever felt any guilt over it. His attitude seems to have been you’re either on the bus or off the bus. Once you got off his bus for whatever reason you were no longer a concern of his.