Filed under: Random Thoughts, Writing | Tags: battle, bitch, boobs, bromden, crazy, cuckoo, cuckoo's nest, east, electro-shock therapy, english, epic, essay, est, flew, institution, jcc, jcc english, ken kesey, kesey, lipstick, literature, lobotomy, mad, madness, mcmurphy, merry pranksters, nest, one, one flew east, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, one flew west, orange, power, ratched, result, struggle, thought, thoughts, transorbital lobotomy, ward, west
“…one flew west. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” (Kesey 239).
Ken Kesey’s riveting novel definitely opens one’s eyes to a time and place that normal society almost never thinks back to. The sixties, a sanitarium, and men fighting– to the death, sometimes– in a battle for their own dignity.
I recently finished writing and revising my essay for JCC English, and in doing that and from reading the book I have opened my mind to so many strange facets of society that I hadn’t before. Lobotomy– permanently damaging (NOT helping) someone’s brain– was popular then. So was electro-shock therapy, which is essentially electrocution for the “insane.”
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the ward nurse Miss Ratched runs the place with a brutal, iron, ice-cold fist. “…I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and just what current to send up to get the results she wants” (Kesey 30). Then in comes the indomitable Randle Patrick McMurphy, a sane man who thought the ward was safer and less rigorous than the work farm he’d previously been on. The epic (at least to my mind) struggle of a man fighting for his fellow man against the cruel power of the institution makes for not only good reading, but a stimulation of the mind… a kind of minor electro-shock that sets off other little-shock-thought-processes.
What was McMurphy fighting for? What was he fighting against, really? A bitch with huge boobs and strange orange lipstick? Or a gargantuan power determined to kick the defenseless?
Although the result of McMurphy’s battle for change is unexpected and alarming, and certainly disheartening, I found myself bizarrely reassured by the end. The casualties encountered on the way to the final product that was the ward had not really been in vain, after all. One flew east, one flew west… Madness overtook the patients and they could fight it or give up. They either committed suicide, or were killed, or were discharged or left. But in the end, the point was, they all flew.
Kick Drum Heart 