ON FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST
Interested in getting direct access to the psychedelic drugs, Kesey took a job as a psychiatric aide at the same VA hospital. Ingesting various substances and working all night at the mental institution became the inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. According to Kesey, the narrator's voice, which many consider the masterstroke of the novel's success, came one day when he'd done a particularly strong dose of peyote and the first three pages poured from him, establishing a narrative tone that was used effectively throughout the novel. The three pages remained virtually untouched after numerous revisions.Chief "Broom" Bromden is the novel's narrator -- a large paranoid Indian who feigns deafness because people ignored him early in life. In time he decides that it is much more "cagey" to hide in shadows and avoid conflicts. Chief Broom is given the title both because his father was chief in a tribe of Colombian Indians and because on the ward he is given the duty of sweeping.Since the tale is told from his point of view, its descriptions of the ward and its inmates have been distorted. Early in the novel Bromden lets this be known, but insists, "It's the truth, even if it didn't
He is everything a bawdy Irish drunk can be, and his presence immediately sets the ward on edge. More important, however, is McMurphy's role in helping the men on the ward achieve, and accept their own liberation. The novel is broken up into four distinct parts, each containing ten chapters. In addition, it was adapted into a successful Broadway play and an Oscar award winning Hollywood movie. In this case, the Redemption is the return of humor and strength he brings to the men on the ward, notably Chief Broom. " This distorted narrative technique allows Kesey the freedom to exalt the novel's protagonist and to grossly exaggerate the negative characteristics of the novel's authority figures, the central antagonists. To say that the challenge has overt sexual connotations is an understatement -- the very challenge that McMurphy sets himself to is to prove his own virility against the castrating influence of the woman that he describes as nothing less than a ball cutter. This is evident early on in passages such as the following description of Nurse Ratched:She's really lets herself go and her painted smile twists,stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger andbigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machineryinside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load. Kesey was portrayed by many as a misogynist and a racist, a reputation that he has still not fully lived down. Nowhere is his blatant treatment of the tension between the sexes so vivid as in Cuckoo's Nest, however. The four parts give the structure of the novel a feel very much like a sporting event, or a chess game, with the final quarter being the novel's Endgame. Bromden lies awake at night watching what, undoubtedly, were flashes of some of Kesey's own psychedelically induced insights, and sees the horrors of the Combine as only a neurotic possessed of second sight can see them -- people gutted only to find electronic wiring rather than blood and intestines, mindless humming and whirring that drones on endlessly, a knob on the wall which the Big Nurse manipulates to slow and speed up time on the ward, these are but a few of the many examples the Chief gives, witnessing the manner in which the people in the ward have ceased to be human and have allowed themselves to corrode into emotionless automatons.
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Acceptance Essays
