One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest: Individual against the System - Essay Example

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: Individual against the System 2006 Thesis statement Set in the late 1950s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (first published in 1962) by Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is a modern tragedy based on the counterculture that besieged the American youth, challenging the God-like all-encompassing system that, despite its ultimate failure, dreamt of upholding the individual against social dictates, till the 1970s. Kane Kesey’s life took an abrupt turn in 1959. This was the time when he willingly became the subject of a research study on the effects of drugs that caused delusions. He then started to work at a mental clinic as an ordinary helper and began to sense that the patients were not really as mad as they seemed to be. He felt that they were more idiosyncratic than what was permitted by social conventions. To understand their psychological parameters, he himself started taking LSD, the drug that creates delusion. He admitted later that some sections of the novel were written under the effect of LSD and other such drugs. This was the epoch when the euphoria of the triumph in the World War I was over and the younger generation started to doubt and defy the authoritative power, system in America .The protest was mostly manifested by white American middle class youth as shown in their dress code, passion for music, drug dependence, sexual liberation and group life. Some interpreted it as a quest for happiness while others condemned it as morally decadent, absurd revolt against American values and a passion for counterculture (an opposition culture, protesting the mainstream social norms and values). The authority wanted to curb this tendency by banning hallucinatory drugs like LSD, protest meetings, new arts and new genre of literature that was seen as vulgar (Pratt, introduction, One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest). The story is set in a mental hospital at an unidentified time, maybe to invoke a sense of timelessness in the psychic pattern of the patients. There are two groups’ of patients categorized by the administration as `acute' or `chronic’ according to their chances of recuperation. The boredom of daily chores, the non-stop medicine, play of cards, rules and regulations, hang heavy on the asylum. Those who disturb the rules are castigated to the troubled ward or are treated with electric hock—a McCarthy like suffering they have to face. Frequent defiance could lead to a brain incision as a cure to mental disorder. Feat, obviously, has the last word in such an ambiance. But with the emergence of a dissenter named Randle McMurphy, fear begins to surrender to an escalating hope that life will shine over gloom in this asylum. The title of the novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is based on a game that Chief Bromden (named as “Chief Broom” because he sweeps up the halls), narrator of the novel (initially a paranoid patient) played as a child with his grandmother, that he remembered after the therapy. The game has a children's folk poem about three geese, and had the lyrics:One Flew East, / One Flew West, / One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The three geese stand as symbols to to Nurse Ratched (The top of the hospital ward, a middle aged ex army nurse, the woman who bosses over the hospital wards with iron fists, symbolizing the ruthlessness of power), McMurphy (The central character of the novel, the unruly, big , tattooed and redheaded swindler/gambler/boxer. Randle McMurphy was in jail where he was detected as mentally abnormal because of his sexual perversion and aggressiveness and was transferred to the mental asylum) and Chief. McMurphy and Ratched straightly contest each other, like the two geese going to different dirations one to the east and the other in reverse,to the west. While Chief, is the hesitant one, like the goose who flew over the cuckoo’s nest (read at the mental asylum in the hope of recovery). Chief Bromden, a mixed blood Indian while busy in cleansing the floors eavesdrops and sees everything that happens around him. He fears that something called the `Combine' rules the world. For him, the `Combine' is the mechanism continuously watched and monitors the men in the ward. He thinks that those who work in the asylum are in fact parts of the machine that watches them—its wheels, gears, etc. The rest of the lot in hospital thinks Chief Bromden to be hard of hearing and speechless. As no one believes him to be able to hear or speak, he becomes a secret observer to everything that goes around in the asylum. The employees speak unreservedly near him since they don’t bother about his presence and he goes to every floor and very room of the hospital in the plea of sweeping. Chief Bromden is a fascinating character yet one has the doubt whether observations are really the straggling of an insane. The novel, as narrated by his words can sometimes be truly fanatical and this is where Kesey excels as an author. Kesey makes the readers identify with the misery of the patients. He can be humorous; can also be tragic, when one understands what suffering the patients have to endure in the asylum. It is an ultimate dealing of the age-old debate of individual against authorities. The key figure in Bromden's `Combine' theory is Nurse Ratched, occasionally referred as `Big Nurse.' This outwardly affectionate and caring woman embodies, authority and power that steers the wheels of Bromden's invisible machine. Ratched is the ultimate one to decide over the destiny of the patients whether to be released or be detained or punished and to enforce the rules and regulations. Big Nurse encourages the timid types and disparages the patients with indirect warnings and pitiless fierce look, disguised under a veil of tolerance and cheer. With the coming of Randle McMurphy Ratched heads for a war of wills that is an allegory of the fight between the individual and the state or society-at-large. McMurphy challenges Ratched's authority from day one and created an example that affected the other inmates psyche as well. His blustery courage and obstinacy give confidence to others to demand changes in the daily monotony. Randle is a dissident of the nastiest type, and Ratched is up to cutting him to size. The end of the novel (in 4 parts) appears to celebrate a noteworthy crush for the idea of individualism, but read carefully, it will reveal that Kesey carries on the reverie of freedom living however short-lived it may be. Many of the hallucinatory drugs Kesey smuggled away (from the hospital he volunteered as to become the subject of a study) did not suit him, as his friend informed later. But LSD was different. As he said, the drug opened his eyes. His feelings and perceptions after the use of LSD very much tallied with Bromden’s paranoid hallucinations. Kesey admits that Peyote (a psychedelic drug)”inspired my chief narrator, because it was after choking down eight of the little cactus plants that I wrote the first three pages" (as quoted in John Clark Pratt's Introduction to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Viking Critical Library, ed. John Clark Pratt, expanded edition, 1996). Leslie Fiedler whose masterwork Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), is taken as one of little essential works in the topic. Fiedler made a great impact on Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with its story solidarity between a native Red Indian and a white man (an essentially American literary tradition, which Fiedler established in his 1960 essay "Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck Honey!" depicting Mark Twain's two characters as bonded by an heavenly homoerotic inter-ethnic camaraderie an "immaculate male love" to be found in Melville’s Moby-Dick and in Fennimore’s The Last of the Mohicans as well.), a kind of a prehistoric bond that according to Fiedler is sort of a "Higher Masculine Sentimentality" ( Fiedler, as cited in Posnock, 2003), a sort of absurdity that in the end we painfully realize to have been crushed by the cruel and sinister design of the system. Replace system but the all-encompassing god and the novel will almost echo a Greek tragedy. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest has a lot of elements ranking it as a formal tragedy, including the thematic import of self-sacrifice as a modification of the tragic flaw. One can also, in the middle of thousand differences, trace out Shakespearean pathos here. Like Hamlet, McMurphy must become bigger than what he is meant to be in his fight against Nurse Ratched the machine (read the system) to take place; and like many of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, McMurphy must transcend, be one up over the tragedy he is destined to confront. When he is offered the way to escape the castigation of lobotomy (incision of the frontal part of brain as a therapy to pacify unruly psychotic), he coolly refuses saying "I've took their best punch" (p. 298). But Chief has already said, "it was bound to be and would have happened in one way or another ... there wasn't any way of him breaking his contract" (p. 296). That such values would be laughed at does not startle us. Summing up the quandary, John Barsness (1969) says that: “. It has become increasingly difficult to maintain that rugged Frontiersman as hero, particularly since at mid century the society approaches an overwhelming urbanization, and contemporary literature seems totally preoccupied with non-heroes whose landscapes are concrete and steel and whose primary characteristics are fixed upon failure” (Barsness, "Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress”1979). Kesey has been censured as being a sexist and anti-feminist also. Even sympathetic Criticism at times awkwardly branded the novel to have been written from the male viewpoint. Leslie Horst said in an paper challengingly named "Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature," a "liberation" that "exhilarated" one "more than a decade ago" now appears "derogation of women ...attractively packaged." She stresses that Big Nurse symbolizes not only an anti-feminine person, but also all the social powers of orthodoxy, checks, and refutation of freedom. “She is anti-sexual and anti-life. At another level, she symbolizes all the forces of socialization and civilization that would turn an impulse-expressive child into a conforming and deadened adult (Horst, 465)”. But realistic novel demands some consideration of the universal and the log lasting truth and undeniably tension between opposite sexes remain as one very important aspect of it. Yet in our time true author can never survive his arts only by being politically correct. He has to artistically correct too. Tragedy offers an author this privilege. It takes us to a world where one can experience one’s share of the eventual gloom. It is painful, but to quote McMurphy (in his first Group Meeting in Part I, where he starts to develop theory about modern society)” man has but one truly effective weapon against the juggernaut of modern matriarchy, but it certainly is not laughter. “ And that’s how the novel ends. McMurphy give himself up for his fellow inmates almost in the way Christ dedicated himself to save humankind, he being ultimately force taken to electroshock treatments and is belted to a cross-shaped table, an indirect way to compare him with Christ. Like the way most tragic heroes challenged and defied god’s supremacy and in the log run ruined him self so is McMurphy. One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest is an attack on orthodoxy and the system and rejoicing of individualism. Yet it takes us the vital quandary of human existence that questions whether mankind should select sanctuary or liberty. The tragic vision points out to the second, the author implies. . Works Cited Kesey, Ken, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Revised Edition Viking Critical Library, Edited with Introduction by John Clark Pratt, Penguin Non-Classics 1996 Posnock, Ross, Innocents at home, on the legacy of Leslie Fiedler, Book Forum, summer, 2003 retrieved from http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_03/posnock.html John Barsness, "Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress," Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 23 (1969): 27-33; reprinted in John C. Pratt, ed. Horst, Leslie. “Bitches, Twitches, and Eunuchs: Sex-Role Failure and Caricature.” One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and Criticism. Ed. John Clark Pratt. New York: Penguin Group, 1996. 464-71 Read More