Customer Reviews

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Barron's Book Notes)

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Chief sees. He sees the combine and he sees the truth. He sees R P McMurphy enter the sterilised world of the ward and he sees him wage total war on The Big Nurse. The story he tells is at once tragic, hilarious and life affirming. Ken Kesey is a visionary and a radical who saw through the facades and lies and produced a book that no free thinking individual can do without. This is a literary classic and I urge you to read it. It will change your life.

What is the world you see when you read this book? It may not be real, but that doesn't make it any less true. Here is a place where feelings become sensations and overpower the "real world". On the face of it, the action takes place in a lunatic asylum. It could just as well be our world. It's populated by a lot of characters that feel more sane than the keepers of the place. The maker of all the rules - the Big Nurse - is the scariest of all, in her confidence that this is entirely her world, run as she likes. Enter Randall Patrick Macmurphy. Rules? What rules? They don't exist as far as he's concerned. This world is just another to be moulded to his liking. Within a minute of his entry, he's run up against the Nurse. Every inmate sees something new about life- it's possible not to follow someone else's rules and live to tell the tale. The Nurse's world cracks up, bit by bit. R.P.Mcmurphy too realizes the extent to which it's possible to fall into the games life creates. This is one character you'll remember forever - and the lesson he preaches. All the inmates - you included - learn that the game is a game only as long as you know you're playing it. Get caught up and you're just a token on the board. Ken Kesey talks through Chief Bromden - an indian who plays at being deaf and dumb in an effort to run from the game. Grammar is an easy prey to the Chief's onrushing thoughts as he struggles to keep up with the speed of events around him. The prose sparkles with electricity as he "sees" his feelings and expresses them as events. Hostility in the air becomes a chill, and the sensation of death is falling into a furnace. This is a book that reads like walking through a "hall of crazy mirrors". You look back on yourself and don't know whether to laugh or cry.

I'm an ninth grade student and this is the best and one of the only novels that I have read. I like how the Chier narrorates the book, unlike the movie. Movie=2 stars Book=5. -Nikko Ganacias Federal Way Wa. NDG18@aol.com

This book may not be uplifting, but is masterfully written because it grabs hold of the reader and does not let go. I could hardly put this book down, and when I did, the only thing I could think about was how much I hated the Big Nurse. She is truly one of the worst villains I have ever encountered in literature. She needed psychological help perhaps more than any of her mental patients. The symbolism and imagery used throughout the book was wonderful and I thought about this book long after I finished it. The ending was bittersweet, yet satisfying. I would recommend this book to just about anyone.

The book, One Flew Over the Cukoos Nest, written through the point of view of an Native American, named Bromden, who has a sophisticated way of looking at things. He sees right through the facade of the physical and into the hearts of man. The subtleties are not to decieve this simple man, but they do imprison him. He lives in an asylum for rehabilitation into society, yet their life affirming egoes are put down by the "Big Nurse" whom acts as if conforming is to be spiritually dead. To change all of this is R.S. McMurphy, a country wit who has the biggest ego of em all, boasting to win every bet even life. He doesn't plan to stay in this nut house, he is saner than any man could possibly be; he loves to be alive. By being in the asylum, he contradicts all activity that occurs, he laughs and sings, and everyone else, is dead.

McMurphy's antics disrupt the Nurses control over the asylum, and they start what can be called a psychological war. The Nurse is declared savior of the asylum, yet through Bromdens insight we clearly see the opposite, as the men in the asylum are destroyed by the pressure placed on their minds. These two dominating charachters create two choices for the men; to stand up for their identities and gamble them in life, or to leave their minds to be molded in the Nurses structure. The antics of both maintain the book full of thrills and anticipation as the showdown between the Nurse and McMurphy comes to hand. The ending will move you. This has the benefits of genius, Ken Kessey writes so that every detail be investigated, and he affirms that with every defeat comes a more intricate victory.

This book deserves to be a classic and may remain one for quite a long time. The first reason is that it is an adventure book in a strange country, beyond all frontiers and borders, in a psychic world, that of an asylum. It is full of suspense and typically the fight between two people, an inmate, a man, on one hand, a nurse, a woman, on the other hand. Both white with the rest of the personnel being black and the rest of the inmates being europeans, except for one who is an Indian. Clear cut adventure and action with blood, violence, wit and enough sex to be appealing. The second reason is that it is an extremely detailed trip down into the psychiatric health system, into the institutionalizing of all displeasing people, all disrupting people, all disquieting people, in one word people that cannot live in society without causing some kind of a stir. All types are studied here and all cases are refused as being the results of some repressed personal sexual drive. It may be the case, but most of the time it is just plain repressed individuals, rejected individualities, refused personalities. They are locked up away from society for this society to go on thinking all its members are beautiful, clever and brilliantly aware of what the future will be and what they have to do to make it come faster. But that is not all. The novel is an allegory too, an allegory of what changing a society may be, of what historical change may mean. The allegory follows a pattern. Change can only come from the rebellion of the victims of the dominant social order, the Combine as Chrief Bromden calls it. This is the typical revolutionary pattern. But Kesey adds the fact that this rebellion of the main victims can only come if some particular person arrives among them and wakes up in them the energies they need to become rebellious, to recapture their freedom from the Combine. The pattern of the Savior, the guru, etc. But this pattern is defeated in a way because the Combine's strategy will be to isolate this leader, victimize him in order to reduce his influence, or even destroy him if necessary, in this case with a good old lobotomy that leaves him a vegetable for everyone to admire in fear and awe. And yet things will fail for the Combine, because in any modern democratic society people are individuals and they use their individual rights to vote with their feet against the Combine. In a word the Combine fails because everyone runs away from it and leves it alone in the battlefield which is no longer a battlefield but a plain empty wasteland. That's how the Combine is forced to accept change and to change. This optimistic ending is contained in the symbolic last scene or episode, that of the self-liberation and escape of the Indian Chief. He finds out and we find out with him that nothing was wrong with him, except that his presence was disruptive for the plans of the Combine that required his village to be bought up and its inhabitants to be scattered and taken care of with good old fire-water. And that is the last level of allegory : the repressed past of a country, people, culture, individual will always finds its way to freedom and regeneration, and then the whole world will have to make do with it. The Combine, the establishment of any society, can always sacrifice some people, leaders or not, on the altar of their established power, sooner or later this established power will crumble under the pushing from those it has repressed and exploited since it took over from another establishment before it. Cyclical instating of one establishment against another and of its falling down in front of a third one. Is there any meaning in these historical cycles ? No one knows and no one can know, though quite too many people pretend to know and have a ball of crystal in the back of their eyes. One flaw however at the beginning of Part IV: Chief Bromden loses his grip on the narrator's point of view and suddenly knows the private thoughts of our dear Queen Ratched.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne

I like how the story functions as a metaphorical apologia and still have an exacting terra incognita. When Broom describes the way Pete's hand turning into ball, he says that with a feeling like that was an excrescence, or an abnormal growth. He says everything like it was sweet as a cyclamen and cheap as a flophouse. In recapulation, the book was great. It shows a man's look from the outside of a place where he shouldn't be.

I think that this book was great, although I preferred the video. The only flaw with the video was that Bromden was not a main character until the end, whereas, in the book, his character is vital. The book has some great qualities, with parts making you want to give Nurse Ratched a real good slap. The characters are loveable and when watching the video you can really sympathise with certain characters. Jack Nicholson was great and really fits the character of McMurphy. I think that the book should be read by all, and the video should certainly be watched!!!

This book is an amazing literary work that is a must read. It will make you think and provoke emotion, it is also a great movie starring Jack Nicholson.

One flew over the cookoo's nest is one of the first novels I ever read. I think I was about ten when I read it. I have read it a few times since. I even worked in a mental hospital because of this book. The first time I read the book, I didn't understand very much of it. Even then, I resonated stongly with the power struggle of boisterous Mac murphy against the heartless nurse ratchet. A classic power struggle of human compassion against the Institution. Now after all these years I must say I'm starting to sympathize with the nurse more.