One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: 50th Anniversary Edition

Truly a story for the ages. This book will simultaneously make you laugh and cry, disturb and delight you, and stick with you for weeks to come. Kesey perfectly balances genuine heart and soul with visceral and psychological horror, particularly when it comes to the relationships between the institutionalized patients and the powers that be. Nurse Ratched makes for a wholly realistic, cold villain, and she is matched perfectly against McMurphy. I loved the narration from Chief as well, and the penultimate scenes are where his perspective really shines. This is a heavy book at times, so I don't recommend it to a younger audience. But I'm so glad I read it, and I couldn't recommend it more!

Not sure what I expected. I haven't seen the movie adaptation but I knew the basic plot, so I thought. The story is mostly cohesive, though there is some stream of consciousness-like parts that I had a hard time with. Will mark it off the to read list, but not a favorite.

Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Although the story takes place mainly in a mental hospital, its ramifications can be felt in all of the broader society. The struggles depicted in the various characters, both internally and inter-personally, will give the reader pause and perhaps change your perception on life.The story at its core encompasses the struggle between the individual (portrayed by Randall McMurphy) and the establishment (Portrayed by nurse Ratched.) It is told through the eyes of the schizophrenic half-Indian known as Chief Bromden. Bromden has pretended to be deaf and dumb for so long that everyone takes this fact for granted. It also allows him to overhear comments from the staff that others would not. The Chief is an interesting choice as narrator, and at times it seemed like he was rambling on about nothing. Unreliable narrators can be a touchy thing, but Kesey is able to navigate his way through the Chief's mind, and in time we find his ramblings have a purpose. He views the establishment as a machine, which he refers to as "the combine." He speaks of fog machines, wires in the walls, and robotic people, and views them as part of the combine. Even the name of the nurse, Ratched, sounds almost like "ratchet," which is a common tool. The Chief sees the struggle between the Big Nurse, as he calls Ratched, and McMurphy, and even though he has a sense right away that McMurphy is different, Bromden doesn't hold out much hope. After all, the combine is a massive machine and the Chief knows what it did to him. Bromden tells McMurphy he "used to be big," but not any more. The Chief's mother, a white woman from town, along with the government, broke down both he and his father and became bigger than both of them put together.The antagonist is Ratched, an ex-army nurse who rules the ward with an iron fist. She preys on the weaknesses of the patients and attacks them in those areas. She is all about control and power, and over her long career has devised many ways of projecting this with a cold, machine-like efficiency. Ratched has hand picked her staff based on their cruelty and submissiveness. The Chief calls her "The Big Nurse," which reminds me of Orwell's Big Brother, and mentions early on that "The Big Nurse tends to get real put out if something keeps her outfit from running like a smooth, accurate, precision-made machine" (pg 24). Indeed the Chief sees her as a machine, part of the combine who's purpose is to make others small. Ratched represents the oppressive nature and de-humanization present in modern society.And then there is Randle McMurphy. Sent to the ward from a work farm (because it's "easier" time), McMurphy comes in loud and confident. His singing and laughter are something new for the patients so used to suppressing their emotions. And he is definitely not the kind of patient the mechanical and repressive Nurse Ratched wants. It only takes McMurphy one group session to see Ratched's method of exposing the patient's weakest areas and pecking them into submission. Harding, the subject of the group meetings earlier frenzy, explains that it was all therapeutic. McMurphy, however, gives Harding his perception: "what she is is a ball-cutter. I've seen a thousand of 'em...people who try to make you weak so they can get you to...live like they want you to. And the best way to do this...is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst" (pg 56). So McMurphy, ever the gambling man, makes a bet with his fellow patients that he would be able to make Ratched lose her composure, and he accomplished this by using her own tactics against her. As he pulls Bromden and the others out of the "fog" and makes them big again, McMurphy unwittingly becomes the savior of his fellow patients. It did not go un-noticed that the electroshock table was cross-shaped with the patient restrained by the wrists and feet and a "crown" placed over his head. When McMurphy rips Nurse Ratched's tightly starched uniform and exposes her breasts, he is symbolically exposing her hypocrisy and breaking the power she had once wielded over the patients. Chief Bromden's final act of mercy cemented Nurse Ratched's fall as well as giving McMurphy the dignity that he had earned.Perhaps the largest piece of advice I pulled from this novel is to never let anyone or anything take your individuality. Society in general would like to have everyone fit into the same mold because then the people are easier to predict and control. However, we all need a McMurphy in our lives to show us that we can still be individuals and fit into society. And when The Combine tries to weaken you and make you conform, just throw your head back and laugh like McMurphy, "because he knows you have laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy" (pg 233).

Impressive story of love, loss, and living to the fullest. Society does all it can to make us conform. It takes a real artist to show us we don’t have to.

Another book that so many people read in high school that I somehow never had to read; I was hesitant, yet excited to read it all at the same time. I am glad I did.The story is told by Chief, the Big Indian. Through his eyes we see the ins and outs of life in the mental ward. The author uses the Chief's own inadequacy to set the tone for the other patients in the hospital; each goes through life with the pace of a crawl. The processes and procedures are in place to help them acclimate themselves to life outside the ward in hopes that some day they may rejoin society. Or that is what the staff tells them anyway.We are introduced to a few figures with relative authority over the goings-on within the hospital walls, though their power is usurped by one woman. The head nurse. Over years she has manipulated the people around her, scaring off doctors and ward staff that she did not feel she would be able to control. As we join the story, her pieces are in place. She has a doctor overseeing the ward that is too timid to deny her control and three hospital attendants that are as immoral as she.She has her way with the patients' minds. In group therapy sessions she asks the men to point out the shortcomings of others thus reinforcing their insecurities. These same insecurities are the reasons that for many of the men are in the mental hospital in the first place.She keeps them weak and afraid, exerting her control until one new patient comes along and begins to question authority. R.P. McMurphy has bucked the system in every environment he has entered. As a result he had seen every form of punishment except one: the mental hospital. He was, maybe for lack of a better excuse, labeled a psychopath and duly committed. Now he has a new set of rules to break.McMurphy may be euphemized as out-going, though others may prefer to call him obnoxious, pushy and loud. He is, in all respects, both the complete opposite of every other patient on the ward and the exact thing the nurse has worked so hard to avoid. With relative ease she has broken the spirits of every man before McMurphy and they both get creative as their rivalry grows.She has control over the men's daily routine and has guided their thoughts as well for so long. McMurphy obtains control over their sense of freedom, but will that be enough?The mental hospital was a great microcosm for society at large. The patients are everyday people. The nurse, more abstractly, is societal expectations and normal, "acceptable" behavior. The Chief could be you or me. He, more than the other patients, has acted in a way that is in line with what others have assumed about him and not how he wants to act. He conforms to what people tell him he is. McMurphy represents the small portion of the population that thinks outside the box. He is the free thinker who teaches us that it is ok, and should even be encouraged, for us to question authority.Too often we do things because that is...just what you are supposed to do. We get out of bed, get dressed, go to work, go home, have dinner, kiss our spouse and go do bed. We are "grown ups" now and that is what grown ups DO. But why? Why not shake things up? We have the ability to carry ourselves with the integrity of adults though we live freely from others' expectations of us.McMurphy champions the mentality (to keep with the setting of the book) that we need to maintain some sense of autonomy. You can control where I live and you can control what I do during the day, but I will not let you control how I think and feel. And most importantly the lesson he focuses on is that no matter how tough the going gets, never forget out to laugh. This is an incredibly powerful tool we can use to avoid being swept under the control of societal pressure and expectation. With our laughter we show others that we are still in control, but you have to mean it.This may be completely off base with what Kesey had hoped to portray in his book, and it may mean something else entirely to you. But that is, after all, the beauty of it. I am not head nurse. I am not here to tell you how to think and feel about this book. But I do recommend you read it and find out for yourself. As I got into the book it was good, but not great. By the end I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really enjoyed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I have always loved the movie of this book but have only just got around to reading it. In some ways the screen version has more emotional punch, particularly at the end, driven in part by Nicholson’s mesmerising performance. The book, however, is far more textured and layered - I was not expecting the richness of the Chief’s narrative: the echoes of a lost way of life and the powerful extended metaphor of a new way of life like some enormous machine or ‘combine’ controlling people. It has a romantic edge - a warning of the turning away from the land, a warning against institutional control. A beautiful book, elegiac in tone, one I will return to in the future to fully appreciate the scope of its vision.

Can it really be 50 years since the publication of this book, I remember my first reading in the mid 70's and it has been a great pleasure, and a walk down memory lane, to once again make the acquaintance of the residents of an Oregon Psychiatric Hospital and in particular one Randle P McMurphy. Most people will remember the 1976 movie and the electric performance of Jack Nicholson as the audacious and colourful "Mack", in a movie that won many awards. The book has lost none of its magic even now reading the it so many years later, and the emotions that it can produce are still very real.McMurphy is moved to the mental institution from a prison farm where he was serving a sentence for the rape of a 15 year old girl. Although he is not mentally ill, he is hoping to avoid hard labour and serve the rest of his sentence in a relaxed environment. The life of the rest of the inmates is now turned on its head as McMurphy proceeds to wreck havoc in an attempt to control and alter the mundane existence of lethargic and inactive inmates...."We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psychoceramics, the cracked pots of mankind."....The only obstacle standing between Mack and his dreams is the formidable figure of the steely strict Nurse Ratched....."Her face is still calm, as though she had a cast made and painted to just the look she wants. Confident, patient, and unruffled."...The story is told in the first person through the eyes of one long term resident Chief Bromden a tall native American believed to be deaf and mute. Through a series of minor misdemeanours and coercion McMurphy is hoping to breakdown the stranglehold of power that Nurse Rached holds over the inmates, who are dulled and kept under control by the constant and daily consumption of medication. It would therefore appear that the prime function of the institution is to manage, by this use of drugs, the minds and temperaments of the residents, rather than try to rehabilitate them and reintroducing them back into society where they might once again make a useful contribution. If the use of drugs and stimulants fails to pacify the disturbed mind the institution is willing to apply electroshock therapy and in the most severe cases a lobotomy is performed.This is a book fully entrenched in the methods and institutions of its time. It is also a story of power and authority, those who wheel it and those who would attempt to question it by any means possible. It is a wonderful and colourful narration, strong and memorable characters, essentially funny yet ultimately sad. To me Randle P McMurphy is more than a comic figure, he chooses to question the reality and sense of his surroundings and by doing so set himself on the road to confrontation with the soulless Nurse Ratched and ultimately there can only be one winner, and an ending that is both shocking and captivating. Highly Recommended.

I had to think about things for a long time before I got round to deciding how to rate this book. There were moments while reading that I felt like it was a true masterpiece, and there were moments that I felt uninterested and quite confused. I have actually seen both the film and the play (both of which I loved) in action before reading, so I already had a very clear idea of how the story played out, but I don't think my feelings would be different if I was coming into reading the book with fresh eyes. Randle Patrick McMurphy was such a character and despite his obviously devilish, sneaky ways I fell for him as soon as he entered the book. Meanwhile, Nurse Ratched is probably one of the most terrifying villains I've ever come across in a book and I'm finding it tough to imagine any character ever beating her in this. Her calm, icy demeanour played off against McMurphy's fiery, quick-thinking personality perfectly and I adored watching them try to outsmart each other. These two were an example of perfect characterisation and I thought it particularly meaningful that the 'hero' was a conniving petty criminal, and the villain a supposedly charitable nurse who dedicates her life to 'helping' people. Chief Bromden was an interesting character but I wish less time had been dedicated to his slightly bizarre thoughts/memories and he'd had a little more to do. Kesey wrote well enough and built his world spectacularly also, but I'm afraid to say the overall message didn't wash so well with me. There is a lot of very racist, misogynistic language to be found in this novel and it has a very clearly symbolised anti-feminist tone that also conveyed a lot of hatred towards society as a whole. A lot of this was left out of the aforementioned film and play and so I didn't realise quite what I was getting myself into until I started reading. Although I think this book was cleverly written and did bring some brilliant moments to the table, it lost itself in the message it was trying to convey.

I bought a brand new copy so the condition was absolutely fine, unlike many of the negative reviews here which seem to be based on the condition of the book or the grammar.I read the introduction and then got twenty paged into the actual story before deciding to give up, I don't know exactly how to describe the way the book is written but I find it pretty much impossible to read. Reading should be a pleasure and keep you engaged, this book is neither and is an effort and a chore to read. The movie was great, I would advise anybody to simply watch the movie rather than attempt to read this book.

The book by Ken Kesey popped up on kindle deals for £0.99 and I thought it would be worth a read.I found that it was a good read until the fishing trip. This thanks to kindle speak was at 78%, quite a long way in.At that point I just failed to make sense of the novel. Here's Randle McMurphy the principal character who is in the mental hospital as a convicted criminal serving a jail term. Therefore in mental hospital to assess his mental state but all the same a serving prisoner who had been sent from a penitentiary. Then off he goes taking a party of other hospital patients on a fishing trip basically unsupervised although the doctor jumps on the trip at the last minute, not to supervise but to enjoy the trip.OK, I know it's a story etc etc, but come on this could never happen even in dream land.It spoiled the book and my day for me. I'd read 78% and I was engaged and enjoying the tale, then well, shame for me, all ruined.Anyway, if you can handle the perverse event in the story the book may appeal to you. It is well written from a prose and event flowing angle. Mr Kesey also makes the characters come alive and seem realistic. But for me that fishing trip ruined it.