One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest
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Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, about the goings on inside a mental institution, the difficulty of defining insanity, and the struggle of individual versus group mentality, is based on experiences drawn from the author’s own life while working at the Veterans’ Administration Hospital. While there are many smaller differences between Kesey’s written version and the film directed by Milos Forman, based on the novel, the main difference comes from the differences in worldview between the two men when it comes to the relationship of the individual to society, “Imposing his own subjective viewpoint on the story, Forman altered somewhat Kesey’s attitude toward insanity. Whereas Kesey sees the poetry in paranoia, Forman is more attentive to the destructiveness in all forms of mental unbalance. Kesey has more faith than Forman in the chances of the individual outside of social forms. Although there is some hope, even if rooted in fantasy, in the last page of Kesey’s novel, there is nothing but a haunting image of self-annulment in the concluding frames of Forman’s film” (Searles, 1992, 171). Of course, the reason for the above discrepancy may have to do with the actual lives of the writer and filmmaker than anything else. Kesey, an originator of the Beat Generation Merry Pranksters, counter-cultural icon and LSD experimenter found success outside of conventional social forms. Forman
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people, ignores this and basically forces Billy to have sex with the girl, a fact which eventually causes Billy to commit suicide and McMurphy to receive a lobotomy. In the novel, however, Kesey also has McMurphy’s actions seen as selfish, but through the unforgiving eyes of Nurse Ratched “First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! I hope you’re finally satisfied. Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!” (Kesey, 1962, 304). Nurse Ratched views McMurphy as a con man, a common occupation of antisocial personalities, but as much as she could force McMurphy to stop conning the men out of their cigarettes and money at poker, she cannot stop him from being willful and using others as he sees fit (which, is her job).
Further, in the novel, Kesey makes Nurse Ratched more of a villain and a health professional whose demeanor and intent actually serve to add stress to her patients. She is actually responsible for Billy’s suicide as much as McMurphy is because she brings on his suicide by threatening to tell Billy’s mother of his behavior. In a way, she shames and degrades him, which makes his oversensitive nature breakdown. This is similar to a theory in Goffman’s (1961, 307)
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Nurse Ratched, DSM IV, IV APA, Billy Bibbit, Nurse Ratcheds, Warner Brothers, Despite McMurphys, Cuckoos Nest, Chief Bromden, Awards Kesey, nurse ratched, personality disorder, antisocial personality, cuckoos nest, flew cuckoos, dsm iv, flew cuckoos nest, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality, paranoid personality disorder, dr spivey, book film, film novel, dsm iv criteria, symptoms antisocial personality,
Approximate Word count = 4524
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)
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