One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

by Ken Kesey, 1962

My encounter with Kesey was long overdue. One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest has been on the To Read list for as long I as can remember, at least since my freshman year of college and, given my long association with flower parents, probably longer. And in spite of the fact that I didn't read Kesey then, and have always found myself far too busy to read him since, he has ended up exercising a profound influence on the course of my life. The ways in which this happened are complex and oblique: for example, Kesey was a personal friend of a certain Professor F., and it so happened that Professor F. was the man who exposed me to literature in the first semester of my first year of college, a heady, vulnerable time, a time of peak sensitivity and maximal openness to the rapture of experience, lived or read. Some kernel of Keseyian sympathy must have been born in Composition 101. But there was more to it, for Professor F. also served as both mentor and taskmaster to my bosom buddy S., and it was in this mentoring capacity that F. (and by extension Kesey) exercised his real influence, for whichever spiritual or intellectual heights S. would climb, there too would be Cocodrilo, huffing and puffing at his side and gasping in the heady views of The World Below. And even before meeting Professor F., the literarily precocious S. had been a Kesey fan, had read all his stuff, sympathized with the drug culture, plumped for the dropouts and derelicts and dispossessed, and generally led a life in which success was assured as long as failure was achieved early. This conviction has dogged my tracks for many a year.

So it should come as no surprise that in reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I felt a strange sense of homecoming. The book is a delight to read, and reminded me of the heady days of undergraduate literary decadence, when to read was to indulge in the worst excesses of pleasure, scholarly neglect, and self-indulgence. The characters (caricatures, really) are huge, vivid, and marvelous, and the lines of conflict are drawn cleanly over the class and gender concepts burned deep in my sympathies by the machista upbringing of a boy-heavy household. McMurphy is a man’s man, hairy as an ape, smarter, stronger, and more likeable than anyone in the ward, while Nurse Ratchet is a perfect ogress, power-hungry, manipulative, vindictive, and cruel. The patients are lovable victims of a warped institution that advocates its own power and control over those of its interns, and the eventual defeat/triumph of McMurphy and his disciples is as gratifying as it is obvious.

In some sense, the book is too easy: everyone is either likable or detestable, and the usual muddied middle ground where most of us pass our lives is passed over in favor of cruder archetypes. But in his broad and sometime cavalier passage through this microcosm of society, Kesey touches on themes that are dear to me: the meaning of sanity, the struggle for freedom, the importance of community. It is important to remember that not every text can or should attempt to fulfill every function: this is a black comedy, and it succeeds in raising exactly the sort of powerful, laughter backed elation that only comedy can hope for.