When you hear the words “mental asylum,” cream padded walls and canvas straight-jackets that entomb incoherent patients as slobber drips lazily out the corners of their mouths usually comes to mind.
Yet in Ken Kesey’s book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, it seems that those committed into the hospital act more human than those who run it. Being force fed insanity through unnecessary medications and shock treatments it seems that the nurses and doctors breed their own manifestation of insanity inside the ward.
The story is narrated by a towering Native-American, Chief Bromden, who is diagnosed to be deaf and dumb. In reality he hides behind this diagnosis to slip off into his own observations of the hospital as he eventually understand the twisted clockwork of the ward. A fly on the wall who catches all the comments and snickers between nurses and aides that show just how much they take advantage of those who can’t speak up for themselves due to a mental disorder or disability.
Almost like a messiah sent from heaven the burly Randle McMurphy is committed into the hospital because repeated assaults in a handful of prisons and work farms across the country.
From the get-go it is obvious that McMurphy does not take well to authority and makes it a struggle for Nurse Ratched to close her cold grip to make him submit to the long established rules. Starting a ruckus when it comes to poker games or watching the World Series during working hours McMurphy does all he can to get a chuckle out of his fellow peers who are scared witless by Nurse Ratched.
McMurphy slowly starts to win over the trust of a handful of patients who feel he is their voice when it comes to questioning the rules and regulations that are so strictly enforced, but Nurse Ratched always finds a way to pick apart his followers and bring them back under her crooked wings.
McMurphy finds his most loyal friend in Chief Bromden, who confides to him his secret of being able to hear and speak. Bromden can do more than just speak and hear, but his powerful and descriptive diction used to narrate the story really capture the triumphs of McMurphy and the cold, calculated plots of Nurse Ratched.
Bromden describes those who work at the hospital as mechanical robots who go about their business without any passion or personality. Simply precise and measured actions that are meant to convert each patient into a machine themselves to better control and manipulate them.
It seems that McMurphy gets away with more than he is supposed to, while Nurse Ratched sits in frustration behind her office, waiting to pull the trigger and send McMurphy to the “shock shop” to make an example of patients who chose to go against the status-quo.
Nurse Ratched eventually gets what she is asking for after nearly two hundred pages of McMurphy goofing off and bringing humor and life back into patients who have hidden behind the asylum walls for so many years.
In fact McMurphy is one of only three patients who are actually committed he later finds out. His fellow patients can easily walk out when they chose, but are so sucked into the twisted totalitarian rule of Nurse Ratched that their ability to function in the real world has been lost.
McMurphy finally crosses the line when he smuggles in whores and booze into the ward after hours. This display of mischief earns him the respect of Billy Bibbit, who loses his virginity that night, but also a trip to the shock shop.
It seems that the electrotherapy does nothing to deteriorate McMurphy’s outlandish behavior and horseplay, to the dismay of Nurse Ratched.
Yet when two hospital aides start to pick on a fellow patient in the showers McMurphy starts a brawl with the help of Chief Bromden. Seeing that the shock treatments won’t do much to thwart McMurphy’s violent behavior Nurse Ratched decides a lobotomy is the obvious solution.
After the surgery McMurphy is just a shadow of his former rollicking self. Even though he is practically brain dead the message that he has left on the ward like an unwanted scar is still clear in the eyes of the patients, especially Chief Bromden.
During the night the Chief puts a pillow over McMurphy’s face and suffocates him to death. But in his death Chief Bromden is granted freedom and life when he breaks out of the ward to face the real world, as harsh as it may be.
Kesey does an excellent job using Chief Bromden as the “all-seeing” narrator who has an insight on the mechanical workings of the ward as well as each patient’s personality.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest really follows the transformation of Chief Bromden if anything as he starts off as a feeble and supposedly dumb patient and grows into someone who can learn to laugh at things and find humor in even the most uncomfortable situations as McMurphy did.
In the end it seems that McMurphy was a martyr of sorts as he gives up his life and sanity so that his peers can live again. Outside the cream colored walls and tile floors of an insane asylum.
