Setting
Kesey wrote the novel when he did LSD-tests at a local Veterans\' Administration Hospital. This was in the late 50\'s and early 60\'s. This is probably the time when the book takes place.

Place
The setting of One Flew Over The Cuckoo\'s Nest is a mental hospital in Oregon and the characters, with a few minor exceptions, are all either inmates or employees of this institution. Kesey, following satiric convention, uses the madhouse as a microcosm of American society, a small model of society in which the internal policies reflect the order of the external world.

Important characters
Randle P. McMurphy A manual laborer, gambler and con man, who is admitted to the ward from Pendleton Prison Farm, diagnosed as a psychotic. Really not insane, he transforms the ward by teaching the other inmates how to be free. Finally lobotomized after attacking Nurse Ratched, he is killed in his sleep by Chief Bromden.


Nurse Ratched The Big Nurse, a representative of the Combine, the Chief\'s name for the forces of repressive organization in society. She is a former Army nurse, in her fifties-an absolute tyrant. She maintains order by pitting the inmates against one another; McMurphy compares her techniques with the brainwashing used by the communists during the Korean conflict.

Chief Bromden A huge paranoid-schizophrenic Indian, the narrator of the novel. He is a Chronic, diagnosed as incurable, and has been on the ward since the end of World War II. He imagines himself to be small and weak and pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to protect himself. The Chief is gradually rehabilitated by McMurphy and emerges as the real protagonist of the book at the end. He kills McMurphy after the Big Nurse has had him lobotomized, and escapes from the hospital.

Dale Harding An effeminate man, psychologically castrated by his wife, who has committed himself to the hospital.

Billy Bibbet A frightened thirty-one-year-old man with the mind of a adolescent. He is dominated by his mother, who is a friend of Nurse Ratched.

Max Taber A former patient who caused Nurse Ratched trouble. He was dismissed after being made docile by Electro-Shock Therapy.

Scanlon A patient with destructive fantasies. The last of McMurphy\'s followers left on the ward, he assists in the Chief\'s escape after McMurphy\'s death.


Cheswick McMurphy\'s most overt follower in his early days on the ward. After McMurphy\'s begins to yield to authority, Cheswick drowns himself.

Martini Exists in a world of delusions; his visions are more real to him than reality.

The Lifeguard A former football player who has been committed to the hospital. He explains to McMurphy that commitment means that McMurphy can be released only when the Big Nurse agrees.

Doctor Spivey A morphine addict, chosen by the Big Nurse to work on her ward because of his weakness and vulnerability.

The Black Boys (Washington, Warren and Geever) Chosen by the Big Nurse as orderlies because of their hostility and strength. They keep order on the ward mainly by threatening the patients.


Mr. Turkle An elderly Negro who works as an orderly at night. He is bribed by McMurphy to arrange the party for Candy and Billy Bibbet.

Candy Starr A prostitute from Portland; a whore with a heart of gold. Billy Bibbet falls in love with her on the fishing trip.

*There are more characters but they have a minor role in the story.

The story
Kesey gives the reader an insider\'s view of the hospital by choosing as his narrator one of the patients. The world which this narrator describes is one in which the borders of sanity and insanity are unclear; in fact, he frequently makes it seem that the patients, for all their eccentricities, are really more sane than the authorities who control their lives.

The central figure of the novel is Randle P. McMurphy, a con man who has had himself committed to the hospital in order to escape work at the prison farm, where he was serving a six-month sentence. The story begins with McMurphy\'s admissions to the hospital and ends with his mercy killing at the hands of the narrator, Chief Bromden.

In some respects, Bromden is the protagonist of the novel. He begins as a paranoid-schizophrenic, posing as a deaf-mute. He has been on the ward for some fifteen years and knows the working of the hospital better than any of the other patients. He is drawn to McMurphy, as are all inmates, and during the course of the novel, the Chief learns from McMurphy who he is, and how to be himself. In effect, he has been dead for years and is being brought back to life. His escape at the end of the book is his final resurrection and symbolizes McMurphy\'s final victory over Nurse Ratched, the Big Nurse who is in charge of the ward.


The central conflict of the novel, McMurphy\'s struggle against Big Nurse, rapidly takes on overtone as a symbolic battle between the forces of the Good and Evil - freedom and individualism, represented by McMurphy, against social authority, conformity and repression, represented by Nurse Ratched. The polarization of these extremes is complete: there are no grey areas, no compromises. Nor does all the action take place at a purely literal level: the Chief\'s dreams, visions, memories and fantasies serve to give a heavily symbolic overtone to the story, investing it with elements of myth. To him, the Big Nurse and McMurphy are giants, engaged in a powerful struggle for control over the minds of the patients (though, ironically, he is physically much larger than either McMurphy or the Big Nurse). In effect, the Chief is not so much telling the story as he is creating a myth. And Kesey occasionally plays ironic games with this process of mythmaking. For example, he uses a complex of associations with Melville\'s novel Moby-Dick, another highly symbolic novel which puts good against evil, structure against nature. The only overt reference to the novel is when McMurphy appears on the ward wearing black underwear with the picture of white whales on it. The underwear was a gift from a female literature major at Berkeley: She said I was a symbol. McMurphy\'s joke is mildly obscene and intended lightly. But it emphasizes the serious associations with Moby-Dick, which Kesey is trying to underscore. With her white uniform and immense size, the Big Nurse resembles Moby Dick, the white whale; like him, she is a terrifying force beyond human control, and she also shares the maniacal sense of guilt which inflicts the whale\'s opponents, Captain Ahab. But Kesey\'s myth is much simpler than Melville\'s multi-layered allegory; here, the lines of good and evil are clearly drawn. (Another token of Kesey\'s debt to Melville is the character Billy Bibbet, the stuttering innocent whose name and general character were taken from Melville\'s story Billy Budd)

At the beginning of the novel, McMurphy is clearly a selfcentered, if attractive, figure. He has had himself diagnosed as psychotic in order to escape the work farm, and once on the ward, he sets out to organize things the way he wants them. He draws the inmates into gambling games, which he inevitably wins, and he tries to make things as comfortable and profitable for himself as pollible. But he meets immediate resistance from Nurse Ratched. She runs a tightly organized ward, and troublemakers are stricktly dealt with. (the Chief recalls the example of the last such troublemaker, Max Taber, as an example. His attempts to reorganize the ward resulted in his receiving Electro-Shock Treatments. He was ultimately cured, with a machine installed in his brain, and released from the hospital.)

By the end of the first chapter, McMurphy is clearly challenging the authority of the Big Nurse. He wins a major confrontation over the privilege of watching the World Series on television when he persuades a majority of the patients on the ward to agree with him. The Nurse attempts to demonstrate her authority by cutting of the power to the television set, but the other inmates gather around McMurphy in front of the black screen in a state of open rebellion.

But before McMurphy\'s troublemaking becomes serious, he makes an important discovery. Because he was involuntarily committed, he cannot leave the hospital until the staff - primarily the Big Nurse - consider him cured. He has entered into a power struggle in which he holds no real power. Upon learning this, McMurphy begins to conform, but he finds that he has become responsible for the rights of the other patients on the ward. They have become dependent upon him for leadership, and he is no longer able to act only for himself. This becomes clear to him when Cheswick, who has been his main ally along the inmates, drowns himself in despair, and when he learns that the other Acute patients have committed themselves, because they consider themselves unfit to live outside the institution. From this point on, McMurphy begins to act in their behalf, trying to give them the freedom he has, to teach them to be themselves.

McMurphy begins by smashing his hands through the glass window of the nurses\'station, pretending to be after a pack of cigarettes. Soon the other inmates are joining him in overt acts of rebellion. The Big Nurse finds herself at a disadvantage, but she simply bides her time, waiting for McMurphy to make a mistake.

McMurphy takes advantage of the Big Nurse\'s passiveness to organize a fishing trip for the inmates, in the company of a prostitute in Portland. The trip is the high point of McMurphy\'s influence. Outside the hospital and on their own on the open sea, the inmates learn to act for themselves and regain their self-respect. The rabbits, as Harding describes the patients early in the book, are rapidly becoming men.


The Big Nurse realizes that her authority is in serious danger, and after the fishing trip she tries to drive a wedge between McMurphy and his followers. The stratagem she chooses to emphasize is McMurphy\'s larcenous nature. He has made a profit on the fishing trip by charging each man more than his share, and he has been continually winning from the men in his gambling games since he came to the ward. There is no denying these charges, but Harding defends McMurphy, pointing out that he is, after all, only human and interested in his own welfare. Unfortunately, McMurphy chooses that moment to make a serious mistake. He has undertaken a program of blowing up the Chief to his full size- reassuring him of his strength and individuality. The Chief has responded and is now able to lift the bulky control panel on the ward. McMurphy has previously tried to lift the panel on a bet and failed, but now he bets the other patients that the Chief can lift it. The patients, thinking they know the Chief, bet against him and lose. This seems to confirm what the Nurse has been charging against McMurphy, and even Chief Bromden feels that he has been used to con the other patients.

McMurphy is now cornered. The strain of keeping the men on his side, of restoring their self-esteem, has already worn him down. Now he is forced to act again to regain their confidence. The occasion comes later that same day, when one of the orderlies tries to force a reluctant patient, who is terrified of dirt, to have an enema. McMurphy defends George, and the Chief, realizing what McMurphy must do, sides with him. The two win the fight, but are sent to Disturbed ward to await judgement. There, the Big Nurse confronts them and tries to force apology. McMurphy refuses and the two are sent to Electro-Shock Therapy.

The Chief is returned to the ward before McMurphy and finds that he has become a legend. He has not spoken to anyone except McMurphy in years, but now he tells the men about McMurphy. No one is surprised to hear him speak. He is accepted and understood. His cure is nearing completion

When McMurphy returns to the ward, he puts on a good show of being his old self, but the others can see that he is not. The Chief sees a tired resignation in his face, almost desperate. He is waiting to die. And Harding, talking with McMurphy about his pressures of society which have driven the others crazy, tells him that he, too, is now crazy. The strain of his responsibility has been to much for him, and as the patients in his charge grew well, McMurphy became insane in their place. He is mentally unable to go on. When the other inmates arrange his escape, he does not go; he is no longer able to face the outside world.

The escape is arranged for the night of the party thrown for Billy Bibbit, who is to lose his virginity to the prostitute Candy Starr, with whom he has fallen in love on the fishing trip. She and another whore sneak onto the ward with bottles of wine and vodka; narcotic cough syrup is stolen from the nurses\' station, and the old black watchman, Mr. Turckle, provides a supply of marijuana. Harding realizes the significance of the party; it is the inmates\' last fling. There will be no forgiveness for them after this. It is if McMurphy had chosen to push them to the point of decision. Yet he is unable to escape at the end of the party and is caught in the morning, along with the other inmates.

The Big Nurse places the blame for the disorder on her ward upon McMurphy. At first, the inmates present a united front against her, but she knows their weakness. She confronts Billy Bibbet with what his mother will think about what he has done, and he breaks down. While he is left alone in the office, he takes a razor and cuts his throat. The Nurse has aroused all his deep, sensitive shame, and he is unable to live with it.

When McMurphy is brought back to the ward, he has been lobotomized and is now merely a vegetable. The Chief recognizes that the Nurse wants to use him as a symbol of her continuing authority and he cannot permit this. That night, when he thinks no one is watching, he smothers McMurphy. It is the only way that his victory can be preserved.

Scanlon, who has witnessed the murder, helps Chief Bromden escape from the ward and promises to testify to having seen McMurphy alive after the Chief escaped. The hospital has no policy of attempting to recapture runaways, so it is assumed that the Chief will have no difficulty escaping. He lifts the control panel, as McMurphy taught him, and throws it through the barred window. Then he crawls out into the night and sets off southward, following the path of the flock of wild geese he saw through the window, earlier in the novel.

The Chief\'s freedom is an emblem of McMurphy\'s victory. He has been away a long time, both literally and symbolically. For he is an Indian, the noble savage, the vanishing American who is about to reappear. McMurphy\'s rejection of the forms of civilized behaviour has given Bromden a new life. And though McMurphy has failed personnally (and, symbolically, his hat is too small for the Chief when he tries it on at the end of the novel), he has succeeded in resurrecting the Chief and the other inmates.

Yet there are hints in the novel that the conclusion cannot be termed a total victory for McMurphy\'s followers. One such hint is the discrepancy in the narration at the beginning of the first part, which may be read to imply that the Chief has been recaptured and brought back to the ward, where is paranoia has returned. Consider, too, the fact that the Chief sets off in the direction I remembered seeing the dog go, toward the highway; this links his fate with that of the dog, which was toward certain destruction. Yet such inconsistencies and ambiguities must be considered as undercurrents, for the novel closes in an optimistic tone, and the reader is left with the clear impression that, despite the dangers, the Chief will escape and will succeed in his new life.

The title

The title of the book is clearly allegorical in its intents. The cuckoo\'s nest is the hospital and the one who flew over it is McMurphy. The full nursery rhyme from which the title is taken is quoted in part 4 by the Chief, as he remembers his childhood while awaking from a shock treatment. The rhyme was part of a childhood game played with him by his Indian grandmother:

Ting. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes, she\'s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts \'em inna pens...wire blier, limber lock, three geese inna flock... one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo\'s nest... O-U-T spells out... goose swoops down and plucks you out.


The goose who flies over the cuckoo\'s nest is McMurphy, the chief bull goose loony; the one he plucks out is the Chief, who escapes at the end of the novel, following McMurphy\'s teaching. The goose is also the leader of the flight of wild geese, silhouetted against the moon above the asylum in the shape of a cross, foreshadowing McMurphy\'s crucifixion in the Shock Shop. Tingle, tingle, tremble toes is clearly the Big Nurse, who catches the inmates like hens and encourages them to peck one another to death in the pen of the ward, where they are kept locked in. That she is a good fisherman, a fisher of men, recalls McMurphy\'s fishing expedition and its symbolic overtones linking McMurphy with Christ, but her purpose is to imprison, rather than to liberate, her catch

Theme

The Machine
Chief Bromden\'s fantasies are dominated by machines, and so, consequently, are the images of the novel. The machine is seen as wholly inimical, the opposite of everything that is natural. The Combine, the name the Chief gives to organized society, is a term for a threshing machine, used for mowing down and harvesting wheat. When the Big Nurse is angry, she is compared to a diesel truck run amok, smelling of burning oil. The machines in the Shock Shop are used to punish patients who step out of line; the fog machine is turned on to isolate and confuse the patients; and machines are installed in the walls of the ward, and even in the patients themselves, to keep everything running according to the Combine\'s plan.

The machines are the images of the mechanical order which the Combine is attempting to impose upon society; yet, paradoxically, they are instruments of chaos, associated with destruction and confusion. When the inmates travel outside the hospital with McMurphy - Chief Bromden for the first time in fifteen years - they notice the mechanical conformity that has been imposed upon the world during their absence:
Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory they\'re still linked together like sausages... there were five thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack. And it was always the same little kid, over and over.

The absolute conformity of the machine is not order, but chaos replicated over and over again with monotonous regularity. And Harding\'s vision of society overthrown by the inmates being let out repeats the same motif: a babbling schizophrenic running a wrecking machine, the force of chaos released upon itself. This is nothing more than the same image reversed, for the opposite of society\'s order is not chaos, but the order of Nature, which is what McMurphy represents.

Religious imagery
Kesey uses images associated with Christ and his crucifixion sparingly throughout the early parts of the book, but increases them in the final chapters, when the confrontation with the Big Nurse is deepening and McMurphy\'s martyrdom becomes imminent. The first such image is of the chronic patient Ellis, whose mind has been ravaged by repeated shock treatments, standing crucified, his arms outspread against the wall. Ellis\'s stance is reflected in the shape of the table used for Electro-Shock Therapy: it is shaped like a cross and the patients is strapped to it, like Christ nailed to the cross.

The image of Ellis standing against the wall recurs throughout the book, but is not developed further until the scene immediately preceding the fishing expedition. As the patients are leaving the ward, Ellis pulls his hand from the wall, shakes Billy Bibbit\'s hand, and tells him to be a fisher of men - a phrase used by Christ to his disciples, referring to the winning of converts to his cause. And, in effect, the fishing trip is the conversion - even the salvation, if you will - of McMurphy\'s followers, who, like Christ\'s disciples, are twelve in number. It is on the sea that the inmates first learn to stand firm in their own identities; they learn how, like McMurphy, to be themselves. It is for this reason that during the storm at sea, McMurphy is content to stay in the background and let others - Harding, Billy Bibbit and George - be the heroes who face the storm without life jackets. They are proving themselves.

After McMurphy and the Chief fight the black boys, they are taken to Disturbed, where they are confronted by a patient who says, I wash my hands of the whole deal. The reference here is to Pontius Pilate, who condemned Christ to be crucified, washing his hands after the trial. To wash one\'s hands of something is to refuse to participate in the guilt associated with it.

As McMurphy and the Chief are awaiting their shock treatments, another patient is crying, saying, It\'s my cross, thank you Lord, it\'s all I got, thank you Lord. And as McMurphy prepares to take his treatments, the references multiply:Climbs on the table without any help and spreads his arms out to fit the shadow. A switch snaps the clasps on his wrists, ankles, clamping him into the shadow. They put the graphite salve on his temples. What is it? he says. Conductant, the technician says. Test my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns? Put on those things like headphones, crown of silver thorns over the graphite at his temples. They try to hush his singing with a piece of rubber hose for him to bite on. The preparations for the shock treatment all parallel the crucifixion; even the rubber hose for him to bite, which is like the sponge soaked in vinegar which a Roman soldier held on a stick for Christ to suck while on the cross.


The parallel between McMurphy and Christ is obvious: both gave their lives that others might live. But this parallel should not be pushed to far; the martyrdoms of the meek, mild, gentle celibate and the lusty, brawling con man have quite different meanings. Christ died to redeem the sins of the individual; McMurphy\'s death is not to save the other patients from their own sins, but from society\'s sins against them. As Christ\'s death was a triumph of the soul, McMurphy\'s is a triumph of the flesh: he has relieved them of the guilt they have been taught by women to feel over their natural sexual urges. And he has prepared them for what Kesey seems to consider their rightful place in society - dominating women, rather than being dominated by them.

The role of women
Women in the book are two sorts - ball-cutters like the Big Nurse, who are intent upon dominating men by depriving them of their masculinity, and whores like Candy and Sandy, who are submissive towards men and intent upon giving them pleasure. The fact that there is no middle ground between these extremes is typical of the book, with its polarities of good and evil, mechanical and natural, civilized and wild, etc. The intent of this dichotomy is not to denigrate women (though this is, undeniably, one of the side effects); it is imply a part of the mythic system Kesey devellopes in the book. One of the cardinal virtues in McMurphy\'s world is masculinity, which is associated with nature, spontaneity, and rebellion against the social organization of the Combine. Women who aquiese in a man\'s masculinity, like Candy, are good; those who opposite it, like Nurse Ratched, are evil. Thus we have the dominant female figures of the book: Nurse Ratched, Billy\'s mother, Harding\'s wife and the Chief\'s mother. The last of these is the one we know the most about, apart from the Big Nurse, who we see only on the ward. Through Mrs. Bromden, we see how the castration of both husband and son, works. It was through Mrs. Bromden that the Combine first gained rights to the Indian land on the Columbia where the dam was build. Two white men and a woman had come to speak the Chief\'s father, but upon learning that his wife was a white woman, they decided to approach the matter to her. We are never given details of the deal that was made, but apparently they appealed to her desire to return to civilization, to move into town. And once she had asserted her power, she began to grow (in the Chief\'s mind, power and size are inextricably linked - hence, the Big Nurse). Explaining this to McMurphy, he says, A guy at the carnival looked her over and says five feet nine and weight a hundred and thirty pounds, but that was because he\'d just saw her. She got bigger all the time. As Mrs. Bromden grew, her husband began to shrink in size, and she came more and more to dominate him. And her son, who had already learned that he was invisible to white people, never stood a chance of countering her influence. And so it came to be that, like his father, he had only one name - but the name was his mother\'s. Mama\'s name was Bromden. Still is Bromden. Papa said he was born with only one name, born smack into it the way a calf drops out in a spread blanket when the cow insists on standing up. Tee Al Millatoona, the Pine-That-Stands-Tallest-on-the-Mountain, and I\'m the biggest by God in the state of Oregon and probably California and Idaho. Born right into it. You\'re the biggest by God fool if you think that a good Christian woman takes on a name like Tee Ah Millatoona. You were born into a name, so okay, I\'m born into a name. Bromden. Mary Louise Bromden. And when we move into town. Papa says, that name makes gettin\' that Social Security card a lot easier. The mother\'s name in an image of the father\'s subjection, a mark of his civilization in the sacrifice of his pride and self sufficiency. As his father was born into his Indian name, Chief Bromden was born into mother\'s, and as the name and what is symbolized drove his father to alcoholism and death, it drove the son to the hospital. Nurse Ratched is to the Chief a surrogate of his mother, as she is to Billy Bibbit, and a surrogate wife to Harding. She is the living symbol of their disease, as the archetype of the repressive forces in society which drove them insane. This is why she must be defeated by McMurphy before the other inmates can have their masculinity back.