Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey was written after its author worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward. Yet the novel also demonstrates significant research that manages to elevate it to the level of a serious critique. Published in 1962, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is thus an artistic contribution to that decade's emerging critique of societal handling of mental illness, a loose affiliation of scholarly critics that would include the British psychiatrist R.D. Laing and Canadian sociologist Erving Goffmann and would in 1967 be collectively nicknamed the "anti-psychiatry movement." I think we can understand Kesey's role in this movement by focusing on the narrator of his novel, Chief Bromden. By examining Kesey's handling of Bromden's mental state, both as medical fact and as metaphorical device, the novel's criticism of psychiatry in its year of publication may be seen as part of a larger critical movement emerging at precisely the same moment.
Kesey's Chief Bromden is the half Native American narrator of Kesey's novel. The Chief is represented as a long-term inmate of the ward: he dates his confinement to the end of the Second World War, which is presumably well over a decade by the time the novel begins. But the opening sentence of the novel reveals that Kesey has an unusual vantage for the depiction of mental illness -- the novel will be told by a mentally ill patient. We are meant to note this from the novels opening sentences: "They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them." (9). Of course the "black boys in white suits" are no hallucinations but a straightforward reference to hospital orderlies (likely to be African-American in 1962) -- yet the delusion of conspiratorial activity, together with the blanket suspicion that "they're out there," is meant to identify Chief Bromden as paranoid. This is well in keeping with the spirit of the early 1960s -- the year after the novel's publication, 1963, would witness Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter deliver the original version of his legendary essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," which would note that "in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world" (Hofstadter 85).By 1964 General Jack D. Ripper would be showing classic symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia in Kubrick's film satire "Dr. Strangelove." If we wish to extent our definition of politics and paranoia, we might note that 1964 also saw the publication of the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination, which over two-thirds of Americans believed to be a conspiratorial cover-up. By 1966, Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 would depict paranoia as being the central metaphor of post-war American life: Pynchon's invocation of "The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself" (Pynchon 104) seems to define paranoia as America's default religious vision.
If Kesey's selection of paranoia, though, seems part of a larger trend, it is worth noting that Kesey has given the Chief a particularly unusual sub-variety of paranoia. The Chief believes that his persecution is being accomplished by means of machinery, employed by a human conspiracy -- yet he gives the conspiracy the same name as a piece of farming machinery, "The Combine." Defining Nurse Ratched's role in his persecution, the Chief says:
Working alongside others like her who I call the "Combine," which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the Outside as well as she has the Inside, has made her a real veteran at adjusting things. She was already the Big Nurse in the old place when I came in from the Outside so long back, and she'd been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long. (30)
In other words, the psychodynamics of paranoia in which an internal mental state is projected outwards, and malevolent forces are assumed...
Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest offers an ironic portrayal of mental health and mental illness. The story of Randle McMurphy, told through the eyes and ears of Chief Bromden, shows how restrictive social norms and behavioral constraints are what cause mental illness. Mental illness and deviance are socially constructed. The men in the institution have been labeled as deviants, many of them as criminals too. Yet
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is set in a mental hospital in the 1960's. The main character, Randle Partick McMurphy has conned his way into the hospital trying to get an easier sentence from his most recent encounter with the law. There he discovers life is no picnic for the patients, mainly due to the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, who runs
It is through this opportunity that the novelist reveals the extent to which Nurse Ratchet actually dominates the rest of the staff as much as she dominates the daily lives of the patients. In some ways, she represents the hypocrisy of mental institutions, especially in that day and age. Specifically, the outward appearance of the institution and of all of its employees (including the nurses) is perfectly clean and
Despite his being the most lucid among the inmates, he was still not immune to psychiatric intervention that led to his eventual defeat against Nurse Ratched. This makes society all the more oppressive, not accepting any dissent or differing perspective and eliminating those it cannot subdue. Thus, the story resonates Szasz's argument that mental illness is a myth and that psychiatry is a practice masquerading as a science to
For his trouble, Murphy receives a frontal lobotomy as a "treatment" for his unwillingness to cooperate and abide by the rules and norms, a touch that gives him a Christ-like quality that gives his ultimate fate as that of a martyr to the cause of the promotion of humanity. Indeed, humanity is ultimately indebted to those brave few in the human race who defiantly dare to confront and challenge
The fog is actually generated by two painful experiences in Chief's past: first, the fog in his mind is a recurrence of the brain treatments ordered by Nurse Ratched, and secondly, the fog is a direct reference to the actual fog machine of World War II operated by military intelligence in order to obscure what was occurring on the airfield (Lupack 70) as Chief recalls: "Whenever intelligence figured there
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