|
And any cinephile would have trouble disentangling Jack Nicholson's incarnation of Randle McMurphy in the Milos Foreman film from any of the imagined portraits of Kesey's protagonist produced by reading the book--regardless of which happens first (even now, I can't re-read the final pages of the novel without my head involuntarily playing the Jack Nitzsche score from the final moments of the film, as Chief Bromden smothers his lobotomized hero, then breaks free of the asylum and escapes into the mist). Despite its unsanitized descriptions of conditions and behavior in a mental health institution, this is a book every thinking person should read at least once. There are books. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is one of the latter. The corrosive ends of enlightenment and capitalist aspirations have never been better (or more frightfully) explored, with more believable and emotionally devastating results (to my mind, the only close contender is Joseph Heller's more subtle and ironic "Catch-22"). S. Some would consider its raw images and descriptions a flaw, though having worked myself in a state hospital as a teenage volunteer orderly I can't imagine a more sanitized story ringing true.
The real force of this novel derives from Kesey's keen observation of human character and its tragic response to institutionalized power, both power possessed and power endured. The parallels to contemporary society--especially the paranoia-producing social ills and remedies characteristic of cold war America--are as biting as they are banal.
The book has its flaws, I suppose, if a preponderance of archetypal names and images combined with a tendency to let metaphor tread too closely to allegory are flaws (which, for reasons not entirely known to me, I'm more willing to forgive here than in, say, the works of C. Locked in an unwinnable war with the machinery of institutional society, reproduced in microcosmic intensity by the controlling Nurse Ratched and a host of sympathetic inmates, McMurphy manages to escape only as does the protagonist of Terry Gillam's "Brazil"--through protracted resistance that is ultimately as self-destructive as it is self-affirming.
Then there are books that get into your skull and stay there, their characters and events gnawing away at your understanding and valuation of life like ideological termites. (Spoilers follow) The plot is deceptively simple: a clever, but endearing nonconformist manages to avoid a hard labor sentence by feigning insanity, but consequently finds himself subject to the Orwellian forces of an asylum and its tyrannical and sadistic staff.
And if you think you have the courage of an Ubermensch to stare into the abyss, then you should not only read it, but come to philosophical terms with it. I first read Ken Kesey's 1962 masterpiece in high school, where it reduced me to emotional rubble on more than one occasion, somewhat like "Cool Hand Luke," which I also first saw in high school.
Lewis).
But this book was very challenging for me, a 13-year-old, so I wasn't able to get much out of it. I know it's supposed to be a classic.
You cheer for these characters all the way and really care about what happens to them. I think if your kid doesn't like reading, he'll have more of an appreciation for books after reading Cuckoo's Nest. I read this book in my senior year of high school and it really affected me. This is a classic and every kid should read this book. 5 Stars all the way. I was moved by the characters and their struggles in the ward. Randall Patrick McMurphy is one of the most vivid characters ever made.
Although it often makes critical short lists, I find it difficult to get worked up about Ken Kesey's 1962 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, mainly because it so deeply rooted in a late 1950s/early 1960s mindset that it fails to transcend its own era. The great strength here is in Kesey's narrative. McMurphy is a rough and tumble gambler, con man, and all around huckster who is serving a short sentence at the county farm. At first McMurphy is amused by the woman and her rules and takes pleasure frustrating her.
And Kesey tends to undercut his own allegory by ultimately showing that not all the hospital wards are run in the same way as Ratched runs her ward, a fact that blunts the sharpness of the story's point. The novel is told through the eyes of Bromden, a half-Native American ward patient who has spent many years alternating between his own mental illness and Nurse Ratched's all-encompassing control, and who pretends to be deaf and dumb in order to escape the ward's horrors. Unfortunately, neither McMurphy or Ratched are greatly engaging or sympathetic characters, and as the novel progresses they become little more than symbols for the emerging clash between the counter-culture and the establishment. My own take: read it, certainly, but bear in mind that you really had to be reading the book in about 1963 or 1964 to get the full juice of it. CUCKOO'S NEST is frequently described as a comic novel, but in truth there is little humor to the work; there is instead a pervading sense of irony which--like characters and story--becomes less and less subtle as the novel progresses. It also has several flaws that tend to undercut its own statement.
Bromden is a fascinating creation and his telling of the clash between McMurphy and Ratched is beautifully wrought. GFT, Amazon Reviewer Tired of field work, he feigns insanity in order to gain transfer to the state insane asylum, where the food is better and the work is less--but in doing so he runs afoul of Nurse Ratched, a relentlessly controlling woman who runs her ward with an iron fist. Too late does he realize that both his treatment and ultimate release are entirely in her hands, and the two embark upon a collision course that will ultimately destroy them both.
Because it forces us to grow in its affect upon us. Prisoners, the mentally ill, the homeless, (this book kind of is about prisoners and the mentally ill) are brilliant people in there own way who have lost the power to run their own lives and are subserviant to those who could. My Husband Ran Off with the Nanny and God Do I Miss HerThis book is about the human spirit. It forces us to look at things we choose to ignore and by doing so, it can't help but bring compassion out in the reader. enjoy it. It will affect you in such a way that you may never see things quite the same again. That's a good thing.
|
