Mental Problems In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey is a story that takes place in a mental hospital, within the mind of one of its patients, recording all the events that happen over several months from his perspective. He uses the thinking style and thought processes of our clinically insane narrator to more blatantly making points to the audience, often through personifying mundane objects, visualizing things that may or may not be actually there, and lumping all people besides the insane into a singular body in what sounds like little more than a conspiracy theory. Through this unconventional lens, we see more parallels than we normally would between the common goings-on of society and something like a machine.

Chief Bromden is not necessarily the main character around which this story rotates, but he is the narrator through which we see his world in the hospital ward. At many points, he seems like an unreliable narrator, making things up that aren’t actually there. However, as the story progresses, we realize that Bromden doesn’t really make things up. That is, all the things he tells us are true if we stop and interpret them through the eyes of a man such as him. Taken literally, of course, it appears that most of what he says is complete nonsense, but we can’t take what he says as literal. Instead, Bromden seems to be speaking in metaphors, and I think this is one of Kesey’s stylistic choices for this novel, to make it more than it appears on the surface, especially with a narrator choice like Bromden.

Randle Patrick McMurphy is what can be perceived as the protagonist of this story, though we do not see the world from his eyes and he does not appear for the first couple of chapters. He is the vehicle on which the story moves, always making the first move when it comes to his conflict with the antagonist. McMurphy is charismatic yet rough, kind yet deceptive, tough but easily put down as we will later see. You can notice a certain amount of care put into his rebellion; it certainly isn’t random by any means, in fact, it seems fairly calculated. It takes until the very end of the novel for him to face any true consequences for his actions and by that point he was already doomed, if not to lobotomization then to prison time instead.

Nurse Ratched is the primary antagonist of this novel. Not much outside of what takes place within the novel is known about her other than that she was an Army nurse before she arrived at the hospital. She is the symbol of order within this novel, and as such isn’t so much the antagonist herself as the representation of the antagonist, which is order and conformity. She herself exhibits little signs of power throughout most of the novel beyond the commands issued to her aides who do most of the heavy lifting. The only times she appears to have any control over her inmates are when McMurphy is sent to electroconvulsive therapy several times and eventually sent to be lobotomized, and the latter only occurs after he physically attacked her in front of her all of the hospital staff. Her main weapons are instead psychological: shame, doubt, persuasion, implication, et cetera. Rather than forcefully contain her patients, she chooses instead to seed doubt among them, reducing their trust in the main troublemakers. She employs shame, especially in the case of a certain minor character, whose mother Ratched threatens to tell about his participation in a night of unruliness as well as his sleeping with a woman smuggled into the hospital ward. The threat causes the minor character to commit suicide, which she then uses against McMurphy, causing him to assault her, condemning himself to harsh punishment. In a way, Ratched is a masterful tactician, and whether through deliberate or accidental means, she manages to deal with McMurphy quickly with little consequence outside of her own injury and the loss of another patient.

The struggle between McMurphy and Ratched isn’t just a conflict between characters, it’s a conflict between the greater whole of society and the few who don’t fit incorrectly. One of Bromden’s main mental parallels with reality is what he calls the Combine, a machine controlling the entirety of society with precise motion, like clockwork. Bromden theorizes that the Combine utilizes various machines and chemicals to soothe the population, making them into model citizens who perform each of their tasks to the Combine’s satisfaction with no struggle or resistance. It’s only a few individuals who the Combine hasn’t gotten to, like the patients in their hospital ward, who rebel and are thus sent to hospitals for society to treat them and force them into their proper roles. To him, the insane are the only ones who are free from the unflinching grasp of conformity, and this is overall the general theme of the novel. Kesey is most likely saying through this novel that society is a machine that tries to snuff out the few who don’t belong. Is he telling us to resist? He doesn’t write leaning one way or the other, but he instead shows that the true people among us are the ones who don’t seek to conform, who aren’t afraid to have fun and damn the consequences. He writes that through small acts of rebellion against the expectations of society, we can snag some tastes of freedom.