Literary Analysis 3: One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest

1. One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is the tale of the struggle between the free spirit Randal McMurphy and the authoritarian Big Nurse, told from the perspective of one of the acquitted, the Chief. McMurphy finds himself immediate at odds against the Big Nurse as his mere presence in the ward promotes change and incites reckless behavior in the ward attendees. In other words, he creates discourse in the Big Nurses otherwise smooth, carefully orchestrated production of a ward. He is ultimately what could be considered by some to be martyred in the attempts to liberate his friends from the firm grasp of the Big Nurse and in the end his friends are indeed capable of sticking up for themselves and what they think is right through the inspiration of their fearless leader's civil and at times not so civil disobedience.

2. It's too facile to place a theme of good vs evil on Kesey's work, as the struggle between McMurphy and the Big Nurse can be uses the symbolize a multitude of things: man vs woman (Kesey's writing does seem to reflect machismo, sometimes even chauvinistic behavior), the oppression of an easily manipulated masses. The struggle between an authoritative figure and the resistor has almost endless applications symbolically.

3. Kesey uses the Chief to almost be a metaphoric measurement of the effect of McMurphy's presence in the ward.  Accordingly, as the novel progresses the tone of which the narrator speaks grows from solemn and almost hopeless, to ever increasingly more confident, defiant and noticeable cheerful.


"While McMurphy laughs. Rocking farther and farther backward against the cabin top, spreading his laugh out across the water—laughing at the girl, the guys, at George, at me sucking my bleeding thumb, at the captain back at the pier and the bicycle rider and the service-station guys and the five thousand houses and the Big Nurse and all of it. Because he knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy."

4. Kesey makes use of several motifs in Cukoo's Nest, one in particular being the fog in which the Chief often would hide in. The fog itself, which I believe never actually existed, it was only referenced to by the Chief alone and I believe to be a side effect of the fact that he is mentally "not all there", is a symbol for the control held by the Big Nurse and the Combine (also fairly certain didnt exist). The fog which in the beginning was a regular presence was something that rendered him utterly helpless, however through the persistent presence of McMurphy, the fog ceased to appear.

As I alluded to earlier, I personally theorize that Kesey uses the Chief as a way of showing the audience the effect of McMurphy in the ward. Nothing exhibits this more clearly than when McMurphy restores the Chief to his former strength and "bigness".

Kesey also makes use of foreshadowing in that the many reference to lobotomy in the beginning of the story foreshadowed the ultimate fate of McMurphy.