IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

Ken Kesey was born in 1935, in La Junta, Colorado. He attended Stanford University and later served as an experimental subject and aide in a hospital, an experience that led to his 1962 novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”. That book was followed by Sometimes a Great Notion and several works of nonfiction that detailed Kesey's transformation from novelist to guru of the hippie generation.

In 1975 the book was made into a film directed by Miloš Forman and starring Jack Nicholson. Kesey famously hated the script and refused to watch the film, but many other people did not. After receiving much critical acclaim, it would go on to take all five of the major Academy Awards—for best picture, director, screenplay, actor and actress. There is no doubt the book deserves respect and close-up.

So what does this book about? In the first place, this book is about the mentally ill who live in an insane asylum. They spend all days long there doing nothing but obeying the rules of the medical staff. But there is always somebody who doesn’t want to follow the rules. So, it is the new patient McMurphy. He is not willing to be complaint. He begins to challenge the medical staff’s authority, undermining it by encouraging the men to fight against the petty rules of the ward. Actually, he is not ill as the others patients, he is unemployed and he just do not know what to do next in his life.

The medical staff are ruled by Nurse Ratched, a former army nurse who runs the ward with harsh, mechanical precision. During daily Group Meetings, she encourages the patients to attack each other in their most vulnerable places, shaming them into submission. If a patient rebels, he is sent to receive electroshock treatments and sometimes a lobotomy, even though both practices have fallen out of favor with the medical community.

Eventually, McMurphy learns that Nurse Ratched has enormous power over his future and begins to back down. When McMurphy figures out that Nurse Ratched can keep him in the hospital as long as she wants to—and give him whatever treatments she wants to—he begins to back down from his rebellion. However, when one of the patients, Charles Cheswick, commits suicide, it convinces McMurphy that his role in the ward is larger than his personal desire for freedom.

As being extrovert, McMurphy find friends among the patients. One of them was a dumb Indian whose name is Chief Bromden. He is the son of the chief of the Columbia Indians and a white woman. He suffers from paranoia and hallucinations, has received multiple electroshock treatments, and has been in the hospital for ten years, longer than any other patient in the ward. Bromden sees modern society as a huge, oppressive conglomeration that he calls the Combine and the hospital as a place meant to fix people who do not conform.

One day McMurphy arranges for a fishing trip for himself and ten other patients. He shows them how to defuse the hostility of the outside world and enables them to feel powerful and masculine as they catch large fish without his help. He also arranges for patient Billy Bibbit to lose his virginity later in the novel, by making a date between Billy and Candy Starr, a prostitute from Portland.

Billy Bibbit is a shy patient. Billy has a bad stutter and seems much younger than his thirty-one years. Billy Bibbit is dominated by his mother, one of Nurse Ratched’s close friends. Billy is voluntarily in the hospital, as he is afraid of the outside world.

After the men leave the hospital for a fishing trip and a taste of freedom, Nurse Ratched forces a group shower and cleansing of the men’s private parts since they consorted with a prostitute (even though McMurphy is the only one who slept with her). George, who is deathly afraid of dirt and soap, protests. To protect him, McMurphy starts a fight with one of the orderlies, and Chief jumps in to protect McMurphy. Both McMurphy and Chief end up on the Disturbed Ward, although they did win the fistfight.

Then McMurphy arranges Billy’s date for the night. McMurphy bribes Mr. Turkle, the night aide, to sneak Candy into the hospital, and they have a party on the ward. Billy has sex with Candy while McMurphy and the other patients smoke marijuana and drink. Harding tries to get McMurphy to escape with Candy and Sandy to Mexico, but McMurphy is too drunk and falls asleep.

The aides discover the mess the next morning, setting off a series of violent events. When Nurse Ratched finds Billy with Candy, she threatens to tell Billy’s mother. Billy becomes hysterical and commits suicide by cutting his throat. McMurphy attacks Ratched attempting to strangle her. In retaliation, she has him lobotomized.

However, Ratched has lost her tyrannical power over the ward. The patients transfer to other wards or check themselves out of the hospital.

Chief Bromden decides that McMurphy is not an alive person with lucidity anymore. So he suffocates McMurphy in his bed, enabling him to die with some dignity rather than live as a symbol of Ratched’s power. Bromden, having recovered the immense strength that he had believed lost during his time in the mental ward, escapes from the hospital by breaking through a window. He leaves for Canada and a new life.

While Chief's escape is often interpreted as McMurphy's final victory over Ratched, some critics are less certain. For example, the novel's first five pages are related as occurring in the present and recount observations of the hospital ward, hinting that perhaps Chief has been recommitted and that the Combine eventually wins. Chief relates that a bluetick hound smells his own "fear burning down into him like steam." He writes, "It's gonna burn me just that way, finally telling about all this, about the hospital, and her, and the guys — and about McMurphy."

However, not all people understand what the title of the book really means. The title comes from a child’s rhyme, which also serves as the epigraph. The epigraph reads "One flew east, one flew west, / One flew over the cuckoo’s nest." Since the title is only the second half of the epigraph, "one flew over the cuckoo’s nest" must be the portion of the rhyme that Kesey felt was most important. Flying over the cuckoo’s nest is probably a way of expressing that someone is crazy.The character who goes crazy in the end of the book isn’t the narrator, Chief—by the closing of the novel he’s remarkably sane. McMurphy, the man who enters the ward seeming sane, although mischievous, ends up being lobotomized. As a result, McMurphy is probably the character who "flew over the cuckoo’s nest."

But we can’t forget about the narrator. Who is it? Chief Bromden is a Columbia Indian who suffers from schizophrenia. Although he plays a central role in the story, he is largely an observer. Chief is an interesting narrator because he is certainly not unbiased, and his mental illness can also shed doubt on his reliability. Chief goes in and out of feeling that he’s in a fog, has numerous hallucinations, and believes an elaborate conspiracy theory about the world being a machine called the Combine.

In the first chapter, even Chief himself brings up the issue of his reliability. He says, "God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen."

Essentially, Chief does have a mental illness and he doesn’t have a "clear mind," but does that mean he is not a trustworthy narrator? Chief insinuates that at least some of the story he is telling did not actually happen—but he says it is still true. It is up to the reader to decide, in this novel, whether or not to trust Chief.

To sum up, I’d like to say this is not an ordinary story. This book is one of the greatest novel and of course one of the best books of the 20^th century. It is important to note that a lot of critics discuss the novel. The novel's critique of the mental ward as an instrument of oppression comparable to the prison mirrored many of the claims that French intellectual Michel Foucault was making at the same time. Similarly, Foucault argued that invisible forms of discipline oppressed individuals on a broad societal scale, encouraging them to censor aspects of themselves and their actions. The novel also criticizes the emasculation of men in society, particularly in the character of Billy Bibbit, the stuttering acute who is domineered by both Nurse Ratched and his mother.

References

1. Каминская Ю. Зарубежная литература 20 века;

2. Ken Kesey “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”;

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/;

4. Нугатов В. 2006. Сны Орегона. – Кен Кизи. Над кукушкиным гнездом. Гаражная распродажа Кизи.

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