One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest by Kesey - Annotated Bibliography Example

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Annotated Bibliography. Primary Source: Kesey, Ken. (1999) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books. This is a late edition of the novel written in 1962. The book tells the story of a group of prisoners and patients in a mental asylum. There is a narrator called the Chief, who appears to be mad, and the everyday boring routine of the asylum is shaken up by the arrival of a red- haired Irish bigmouth called McMurphy. This character wakes the prisoners out of their passive doze, showing them how to stand up to the evil nurse Ratched and her violent team of assistants. The book was later filmed starring Jack Nicholson which brought it to a much wider audience and great acclaim. The significance of the book in American literature is that it is a metaphor for society – the dehumanizing force of administrative and medical power is likened to mechanical “Combine” which is a huge machinery of oppression. Normal human behaviours are suppressed and the machinery of power is challenged by the tragic hero McMurphy. In the end he is lobotomized and finally killed by the narrator. It sounds like a horror story and it has very serious themes, but there is a lot of humor in the dialogue and in the quirky character of McMurphy. Secondary Sources: Aguiar, S.A. (2001 ) The bitch is back: wicked women in literature, pp. 18-22. Illinois: Southern State University. This book contains a short but fascinating discussion of the character of Nurse Ratched, the Big Nurse. Using Freudian and Jungian psychological concepts, Aguiar shows how McMurphy sets himself up to fight a huge battle with a typical “ball-cutter”, which reveals his fear of the castrating female. This is then described as an archetypal mother hatred scenario, and Aguiar suggests that all of the male patients in the asylum see Nurse Ratched as a mother figure, and they apparently masochistically project their fear of their own mothers onto her. The target of McMurphy’s rebellion is not just the authority that Nurse Ratched holds, but also her actual femininity, and this is made clear when McMurphy attacks her and exposes her large breasts. Aguiar explores a Jungian analysis of this act in terms of the Oedipus complex, but somehow this analysis is unconvincing. After all Nurse Ratched triumphs over McMurphy in the end, and it could be argued that she is as much a victim of the oppressive system as he is. This book pursues a very strong feminist line, but in Kesey’s novel it finds more questions than answers, throwing up a number of intriguing theories, none of which address the mixed male/female/machine persona that is Nurse Ratched, or the decidedly positive view that the young McMurphy formed of women and heterosexual love. Hicks, J. (1981) In the Singers Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. This book examines issues around the religious nature of the American hero, and links McMurphy with the tradition of the clown and con-man who wanders around selling quack cures for sick world. Hicks sees McMurphy as being the one who energizes a placid and helpless community of lost souls. He is loud and obviously overstates his own abilities but in a strange way he also does effect change on the environment. This is an interesting angle on the book which leads to some possible further avenues for research, such as examination of television evangelism and other religiously inspired media on society. Lupack, B. T. (1995) Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction: Inmates Running the Asylum. Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida. This book analyses several different novels and explores the theme of insanity. She examines the notion of the asylum as a metaphor for American society, by which she means white organized officialdom. There is some interesting discussion about the Chief’s Indian origins, and the fact that the chief’s father gave up his Indian name to take the surname of his wife (the Chief’s mother), which diminished him and his male descendants, both as a human being and in their masculinity. This is interpreted in terms of the way Indian culture was diminished and emasculated by American white encroachment. The ensuing artificial identities and oppressive bureaucracies are then played out in the madhouse. This Lupack sees modern computerized society as a matriarchy gone mad, where human beings are boxed into a corner and have to use madness and rebellion to break free from an inhuman regime but this may be taking comparisons just a little too far. Meloy, M. (2009) “Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity in Ken Keseys One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest”. The Journal of Mens Studies. 17 (1) pp 3-14. This article makes an interesting link between the themes of castration, impotence and masculinity, which are found frequently in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, and American society in the years immediately after the Second World War. Meloy argues that Kesey stands at a unique point in American history just before the onset of the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism. He sees the novel as a reflection of the McCarthy era, where masculinity was under pressure, first because the warrior hero ethos of the forties had been rejected and secondly because the American state itself was turning against its own male specimens. The threat of atomic war and institutional surveillance, often carried out by empowered females, called forth a new kind of virile hero such as McMurphy. Gender issues became tied up with control issues, and Freudian theories were just coming into fashion too. Meloy sees traces of the hippie movement in McMurphy’s subversive sexuality and surmises that Kesey ended the book with most of the men’s stories unfinished, because American masculinity is still in danger. Pinsker, S. (1980) Between Two Worlds: The American Novel in the 1960s. Troy, NY: Whitston This book considers a range of novels with a good examination of their function to critique American society. It is written in a breezy style, and concentrates on the black humor in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Pinsker describes the source of much of the novel’s humor lies in its treatment of death and religion. Many of the characters make open reference to McMurphy’s Christ-like persona, and they seem aware of many of the life and death issues that are in the book, as when they talk among themselves during the fishing trip as if McMurphy is Jesus and they are the twelve disciples. This irony is deliberate, and Pinsker says that the power of the book lies in its demonstration that the sacrifice of McMurphy is in fact what it takes to enact any change in oppressed individuals. They cannot do it through just retelling the myths, they actually have to see them re-enacted in a real death. Walker, B.E. (2001) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Cliff’s Notes). New York: Wiley Publishing. This is a comprehensive commentary on the novel, with a synopsis and a chapter by chapter commentary on the actual text. It traces themes and summarizes the different characters, giving an exhaustive but rather basic and repetitive critique of the main points of the novel. Issues like madness/sanity and inside/outside the asylum are discussed, along with themes of social control, masculinity and femininity, and violence as a solution to oppression. There is a useful introductory chapter on the author Ken Kesey which helps to put the work in context as a reflection on his actual lived experience as an orderly on a ward in a real mental asylum. This text is suitable for educational purposes, but it has limitations in that it gives broad overviews and does not go into much detail on socio- historical or comparative points Zubizarreta, J. (1994) “The Disparity of Point of View in One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest” Literature/Film Quarterly. 22 (1) pp. 62-69. This article compares Kesey’s novel with the famous movie starring Jack Nicholson and concludes that there is a major flaw in the film version which distorts the intentions of the original book. According to Zubizaretta, the narrative voice of the Chief is an absolutely essential part of the novel. He explains how the novel employs “the subtlety of an untrustworthy point of view” which adds great irony to McMurphy’s antics. Because the reader is not sure whether the Chief is mad or not, there is always an edge to the narrative. Without this nuanced narration, the film turns into an over sentimental romp, with McMurphy in comic hero mode. The nightmare quality and the creepy paranoia of the book are not present in the film, and this changes the meaning of the story to something more superficial. It is very entertaining cinema, but it is not what Kesey intended in the book. The character of McMurphy is too prominent, thanks to the brilliant acting of Jack Nicholson, and the darker side represented by the Chief’s twisted viewpoint is not allowed to come forward. . Read More