Review: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Audiobook)

I enjoyed the audiobook of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, read by Tom Parker.  Parker did an excellent job of reading, using many different voices to distinguish the characters in the novel.

 

If you haven't read it, the premise of the novel is this:  A man sentenced to time in an Oregon work farm decides it would be easier to get through the six months if he passes it in a mental facility, so he starts “acting crazy.”  Yes, this bears some relation to Hamlet.

The man, McMurphy, gets transferred to the mental institution only to discover it’s run by a dictatorial nurse, Nurse Ratched.  Then he discovers that, since the state committed him to this institution, he isn’t just in for six months, he’s in until they decide to release him.  It’s all downhill from there.

McMurphy manages some spectacular successes in trying to get the other men in the institution to stand up to “Big Nurse”—including an essentially unsupervised ocean fishing trip with a prostitute, and an evening visit from another prostitute—but it doesn’t matter.  Or does it?

The story is narrated by another inmate, Chief Bromden—“The Chief”—who has been pretending to be a deaf-mute, but isn’t.  McMurphy’s stay in the institution becomes a major turning point in The Chief’s life.  But to tell more would mean spoilers.

Kesey wrote this book after working at a VA mental facility in Menlo Park, CA.  While there, he volunteered to participate in experiments with hallucinogens, including LSD.  This undoubtedly increased his awareness of the grey areas where reality meets fantasy and delusion; which came in handy while writing this book.

I thought Cuckoo’s Nest did a good job of creating the atmosphere of an asylum.  The book made me think about how we treat mental patients, and what we mean by “mental problems.”  After a while I agreed more with The Chief’s (and Kesey’s) opinion that the system simply wanted patients to behave “like normal well-adjusted members of society.”

In the second half of the book, Kesey stretched my credulity, though.  I couldn’t accept that the institution would allow inmates to leave on an unsupervised outside trip—although it turned out it wasn’t unsupervised, since the doctor ended up going along.  But it would have been unsupervised except for that. 

Also, the revelation that most of the inmates of this ward are there voluntarily surprised me.  Yet this is also social commentary:  They have been told that they should behave in a certain way, and they want to behave that way.  So they check themselves in to the asylum in the hopes of “getting better.”

It also seemed to me that McMurphy underwent a change of character towards the end of the book.  He kind of gave up about ever getting out of the institution.  Earlier he’d been accused of just being out for himself, to make money through gambling, for example.  Now he seems to overcompensate—going out of his way to not be selfish; which leads fairly directly to his tragic end.

I saw the film of this novel a long time ago: 1977.  Later, when I learned that the novel was narrated by The Chief, I found it hard to believe.  The film completely focuses on McMurphy.  The Chief is just another character among many; although he performs the final liberating act of the narrative.  In the book, however, the “Chief Point of View” makes a lot of sense.  It ties the treatment of the individual inmates to the state of American society as a whole, and to the treatment of indigenous peoples (Kesey objected to the altered point of view).

The ending of the movie stunned me in 1977. Of course, I was thinking from McMurphy’s point of view.  Seen from the point of view of The Chief, the ending seems much more coherent.  In a large sense, the book is about The Chief, not McMurphy.  This gives you quite a different perspective on the novel.

A good book—an interesting book—an engrossing book.

A word about Tom Parker.  He has recorded many audiobooks.  I highly recommend this audiobook as well as his recording of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.  I do have some reservations, but I’ll get to them in a future article.