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| One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Modern Classics) | 
 enlarge | Author: Ken Kesey
Creators: Joe Sacco, Robert Faggen
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: £8.99
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New (39) from £2.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 2975
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0141187883
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141187884
ASIN: 0141187883
Publication Date: May 5, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 A very American Novel October 7, 2008
The story is well known. Patients and staff in a mental institution live under the controlling regime of Nurse Ratched. Into this stable but joyless society is thrown Lord of Misrule, McMurphy. Initially he sees being in a mental institution as being an easy option compared to incarceration on a work farm, but as the book goes on he rebels in inreasingly extreme fashion against Nurse Ratched and against his fellow patients' retreat from life.
My copy had a quote from the New York Times Review of Books on the cover "A glittering parable of good and evil" which struck me as a very strange description. Yes Nurse Ratched is a figure of evil, particularly in her manipulation of Billy, but is McMurphy good? I would describe it as a parable of power, about the clash between Ratched's controlling power and McMurphy's anarchic, charismatic power. It is a parable of manipulation, both McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are in their own ways manipulative. It is a parable of rebellion and revolution. McMurphy is a revolutionary striving to overturn Ratched's totalitarian state, but would anybody seriously want to live in a world run by McMurphy. He is James Dean "What are you rebelling against?" "What have you got".
Fundamentally though this is a novel which speaks greatly about America today which in so many ways is the product of the 60s. This is a novel of a counter culture which was not so much about overturning American life, but about reaffirming it. McMurphy is all about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He is about individuality, not about collectivism. Just maybe the excesses of Wall St today are the society established by Mc Murphy.
Enormously thought provoking - recommended
One of the iconic works of America's 1960s counter-culture September 26, 2008
`Granted I am the inmate of a mental asylum': the famous opening words of Oscar Matzerath in The Tin Drum could equally be applied to pretend-deaf and dumb Chief Bromden who narrates Ken Kesey's dark and sombre satire on the heavy-handed treatment of mental illness in modern America. Set in the golden days of electro-shock therapy, psychedelic drugs and frontal-lobe lobotomies, the giant half-Indian, tells the story of Pendleton Mental Institution, Oregon, ruled with an iron fist by Big Nurse, an allegorical Big Brother, and her carefully hand-picked team who control the soul-crushing routine of the brow-beaten inmates, cynically divided into Acutes, Chronics, Vegetables and Disturbed. However, the balance of power is sent into a tailspin by the arrival of Randle McMurphy, a hard-drinking, hard-living Irish-American, who takes up the cudgel on behalf of his oppressed companions as he attempts to break the hold of Big Nurse and, by extension, the all-powerful authorities. The charismatic McMurphy, who has faked insanity to escape a prison sentence, bears a close resemblance to the almost Christ-like Cool Hand Luke who similarly takes on the prison authorities in the eponymous film made five years after this novel was published. Like Luke, McMurphy is at times exasperated by the way that his colleagues so often fail to support him and leave him to fight back single-handed, but he retains a touching devotion to them nevertheless.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can be read on many levels. Though essentially a satirical critique on mental institutions and their methods, it also demonstrates the oppressive role that authorities play in controlling and manipulating the lives of individuals in different circumstances, and is a sharp comment on the blurred distinction between sanity and insanity. Boisterous and brutal, it remains one of the iconic works of America's 1960s counter-culture and one of that country's most original and brilliant novels.
 Life is too short... July 14, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
This dull and dusty book dragged on with the occasional witty insight. I was relieved when it ended in its's decisive manner. Not worth it.
A classic that everyone should read August 24, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a amazing novel. The central character, McMurphy, has been sent from prison to a mental institution - as he initially sees it, a big step up. No more working in the fields; he now has a cushy life sitting on a hospital ward. Until he realises that the straightforward rules of 'serve your time and be released' no longer apply: he is now imprisoned even further and is at the mercy of hospital government in the form of the Big Nurse.
Although Kesey's novel is intended as a metaphor for the government's control of people's lives, the reason it works so well for me is because the characterisation is equally interesting in its own right. McMurphy's tense, carefully fought and long drawn out battle with the Big Nurse shows us a lot about his character and shows his growing sense of responsibility towards the other men. The freedom he tries so hard to give them is heavily undermined when he learns that they have entered the hospital voluntarily: his own sense of self worth has become closely tied to his efforts to increase theirs. To learn that the other "prisoners" are in fact there seemingly of their own free will is shocking to McMurphy, who cannot understand them.
McMurphy is the outcast, the rebel, the top dog of his own world, who initially starts by actively embracing the hospital, and ends by loathing it yet not quite managing to leave (despite opportunities). He cannot comprehend why the other men are there voluntarily, yet his desire to help them prevents him from leaving and makes him one of them.
An amazing example of American fiction. March 26, 2007
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' by Ken Keesy is one of the most prominent examples of American fiction in the 20th century. The novel is based, almost entirely on the interactions he had with mental patients while he was working at a mental institution. While Ken Keesy experimented exstensively with LSD, he became very interested in studying perception. This led to the production of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'.
'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is the intense story of a group of mentally ill patients and their over bearing nurse. This Nurse has complete control over the hospital ward, and the patients are entirely beaten down and do not question her authority. McMurphy arrives - and everything changes. A rouge, gamballing, criminal who subverts all authority. He challenges the Nurse's power, first as a game, then as a desperate attempt to prove to the patients that life is worth living. He lives with men, who feel that their lives are over, as they helplessly confrom to the Nurse's whim. McMurphy, brings laughter, adventure, women and booze to the small hospital world; most importantly, he provides these men with a hero. They idolise him as a saviour and through their devotion force him to become one, as he gives his life in their defence. Keesy's novel is powerful, and uplifting, yet with a fatalistic note. We know it can not end happily as the Nurse is a symbol for the whole system of government and McMurphy is only one man. However, the whole novel resonates with power, despite the nihalistic undertones.
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