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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Paperback – Illustrated, December 31, 2002
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Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
- Print length312 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Classics
- Publication dateDecember 31, 2002
- Dimensions5.07 x 0.52 x 7.74 inches
- ISBN-100141181222
- ISBN-13978-0141181226
- Lexile measure1040L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
--The New York Times Book Review
"[A] brilliant first novel . . . a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil . . . Keysey has made his book a roar of protest against middlebrow society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them."
--Time
"The final triumph of these men at the cost of a terrifying sacrifice should send chills down any reader's back. . . . This novel's scenes have the liveliness of a motion picture."
--The Washington Post
"An outstanding book . . . [Kesey's] characters are original and real. . . . This is a tirade against the increasing controls over man and his mind, yet the author never gets on a soap box. Nor does he forget that there is a thin line between tragedy and comedy."
--Houston Chronicle
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Psychedelic sixties. God knows whatever that means it certainly meant far more than drugs, though drugs still work as a pretty good handle to the phenomena.
I grabbed at that handle. Legally, too, I might add. Almost patriotically, in fact. Early psychedelic sixties...
Eight o'clock every Tuesday morning I showed up at the vet's hospital in Menlo Park, ready to roll. The doctor deposited me in a little room on his ward, dealt me a couple of pills or a shot or a little glass of bitter juice, then locked the door. He checked back every forty minutes to see if I was still alive, took some tests, asked some questions, left again. The rest of the time I spent studying the inside of my forehead, or looking out the little window in the door. It was six inches wide and eight inches high, and it had heavy chicken wire inside the glass.
You get your visions through whatever gate you're granted.
Patients straggled by in the hall outside, their faces all ghastly confessions. Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me. but rarely did we look at one another. It was too naked and painful. More was revealed in a human face than a human being can bear, face-to-face.
Sometimes the nurse came by and checked on me. Her face was different. It was painful business, but not naked. This was not a person you could allow yourself to be naked in front of.
Six months or so later I had finished the drug experiments and applied for a job. I was taken on as a nurse's aide, in the same ward, with the same doctor, under the same nurse—and you must understand we're talking about a huge hospital here! It was weird.
But, as I said, it was the sixties.
Those faces were still there, still painfully naked. To ward them off my case I very prudently took to carrying around a little notebook, to scribble notes. I got a lot of compliments from nurses: "Good for you, Mr. Kesey. That's the spirit. Get to know these men."
I also scribbled faces. No, that's not correct. As I prowl through this stack of sketches I can see that these faces bored their way behind my forehead and scribbled themselves. I just held the pen and waited for the magic to happen.
This was, after all, the sixties.
Ken Kesey
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Classics (December 31, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 312 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0141181222
- ISBN-13 : 978-0141181226
- Lexile measure : 1040L
- Item Weight : 7.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.07 x 0.52 x 7.74 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #294,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,560 in Fiction Satire
- #8,238 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #16,555 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the author

Ken Kesey was born in Colorado in 1935. He founded the Merry Pranksters in the sixties and became a cult hero, a phenomenon documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He died in 2001.
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However, that diagnosis only goes so far. His ability to observe and make reasoned and astute analyses of the patients and medical personnel on the ward indicate that he is quite perceptive. Any patient on the ward with the energy to resist or become uncontrollably violent is likely to be sent to the “Shock Shop,” the room where electroshock treatments are administered, resulting in a very passive patient, peaceful but also at least temporarily rid of his short term memory.
Bromden also has a theory of the workings of the Combine, which he sees as the tool the medical people use to thresh, cut, and sort, which is what they’re doing with the patients. Most new patients on the ward would be considered Acutes. They can still communicate verbally with some degree of intelligibility, although if their disorder progresses they may become Chronic, which has happened to Bromden himself, although only as proof of how convincing his deaf act continues to be.
Into this system of control appears Randall P. McMurphy, only there because he faked insanity to get out of his sentence for gambling and battery at a prison work farm. McMurphy is a loud grifter whose mission in life seems to be to puncture holes in any rigid system of authority he encounters. No one is a more rigid symbol of authority in this mental hospital than the head nurse, Miss Ratched. Her name sounds like “ratchet,” a tool for adjustment in Bromden’s Combine. Within a few minutes of being on the ward, McMurphy has started a card game and won a fair sum from the patients on the ward. He is a bundle of lively energy and even the most reticent patients, like Bromden, can’t help but respond. McMurphy wants to take a poll of how many of the patients want to see the World Series on TV in the afternoons. Bromden raises his hand and later worries if his cover is blown.
McMurphy goes full speed ahead in his campaign to challenge Nurse Ratched’s authority until he learns from a fellow inmate who has been committed that the medical authorities—the head psychiatrist Dr. Spivey, but more likely Nurse Ratched—will determine when McMurphy can be released. He is shocked to discover that the majority of the Acutes on the ward—the articulate intellectual Harding, the stuttering young Billy Bibbit, and many of the others—have voluntarily committed themselves and can leave whenever they like as long as they follow the rules and don’t challenge authority. McMurphy puts the brakes on his rebellion after learning this but has already radicalized one inmate, Charlie Cheswick, into demanding access to his cigarettes whenever he wants. After McMurphy backs down from supporting Cheswick’s demand, Cheswick feels betrayed and drowns himself in the therapy pool.
McMurphy has started a process he can’t reverse. As Bromden puts it:
‘Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now; as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out into the open where we’d be easy to get at.’
The McMurphy/Jesus symbolic parallels that Kesey sets in place can only smoothly align to an extent. McMurphy is crude, racist, sexist, and violent. He does energize the men on the ward, making them believe that they can take charge of their lives. By the conclusion of the novel, most of the Acutes on the ward have checked out of the ward, leaving a handful, including McMurphy, Bromden, and Billy Bibbit.
Nurse Ratched has conducted therapy sessions for the patients on a schedule like every other planned activity on the ward. “Therapy” is hardly an apt description for what she carries out. She uses passive aggression to manipulate the patient to respond out of a sense of guilt. This approach has a very personal potency when applied to Billy Bibbit. Nurse Ratched is a close friend of Billy’s mother. She reminds him of this fact at every opportunity and uses it as a weapon of control. Billy’s extreme stutter probably originated from fear of his mother but Ratched, his surrogate “mother,” has kept it fresh, like an open wound.
McMurphy has observed this and concluded that Billy, although over thirty, is undoubtedly still a virgin. He determines to rectify that situation. He arranges an after hours party with the night orderly Mr. Turkle in which liquor is brought in as well as a couple of young ladies, one of which, Candy, had been the object of sexual attraction for Billy on a previous unauthorized fishing trip. The party progresses with everyone falling asleep and waking when the morning shift arrives. For anyone who has read the novel or seen the film, it does not end well for Billy or McMurphy.
Ken Kesey synthesized his experience as a volunteer test subject for LSD research with his experience as a nurse’s aide at the Menlo Park Veteran’s Hospital into his parable of freedom and control. ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ published in 1962, is dated by its racial and sexist slurs. However, in my view, while they place it in its historic context, they do not rob the novel of its narrative power.
I’m not sure how frequent electroshock and lobotomies were performed but within the narrative context of the novel, they are draconian treatments that do not enable a mental patient to recover but simply sap his energy and will to determine his fate. That’s where McMurphy and his sacrifice come in. Most of the Acutes on this ward are no longer acute but men who know that they are free agents in control of their lives and at least one “Chronic,” one “cuckoo,” flies out of the fog, out of the control of the Big Nurse, even out of the control of the Combine, out of this Nest.
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Wie bereits erwähnt trägt sich der Großteil der Handlung in einer Irrenanstalt in den 50er Jahren zu, um genau zu sein in einem bestimmten Flügel dieser Anstalt. Zwar sind fragwürdige Therapiemethoden wie die Wassertherapie bereits abgeschafft, allerdings werden den Patienten zu ihrem eigenen Wohl auch weiterhin Elektroschocks und Lobotomien zu Teil. Der Flügel, in dem die Geschichte spielt, wird von der Großen Schwester beherrscht, das Paradebeispiel eines Blockwarts oder Nazi-Schergens, der mit Angst regiert und die Insassen untereinander ausspielt. Der Leser verfolgt die Geschichte durch die Augen eines schizophrenen Indianers, der vermutlich zu viele Elektroschocks bekommen hat, weshalb man manche Ereignisse für Ausgeburten seines Hirns halten kann/möchte.
Das beschauliche Leben in dem Flügel sowie die Schreckensherrschaft der Großen Schwester und ihrer Helfershelfer geraten ins Wanken, als ein neuer Patient auftaucht, der gegen ihre Psycho-Spielchen immun zu sein scheint. Was Anfangs noch wie eine fröhliche Revolution wirkt, endet böse...
Sprachlich ist das ganze für Menschen, die nicht so sicher in der Englischen Sprache sind eventuell etwas anspruchsvoll, aber dieses Buch lohnt sich definitiv! Die Anstalt und auch die Schwester stehen für bekannte Motive, die uns auch heute noch begegnen und uns Allen täte ein bisschen von McMurphys "Eiern" gut.


















