The American Century: Literature since 1945 639in a mental hospital. This provided him with the material for his first and easily his
finest book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). The novel is set in a psychiatric
ward that is dominated by a character called the Big Nurse, who appears to have
limitless power over the inmates. Controlling her charges by subtle pressures and,
wherever necessary, more aggressive measures such as electric shock treatment, she
embodies the principles of behaviorism. Forcing them to adjust to a prescribed
norm, she also suggests forces at work in society generally. For she is constantly
referred to by the narrator as an agent of “The Combine.” Society is run by some
secret force, the implication is, which tries to manipulate all its members. And of
that force the Big Nurse is a servant and a symptom, although by no means the only
one. Then into the ward comes an authentic American rebel, Randle McMurphy,
who offers the inmates the example and chance of independence. Swaggering, bold,
and with an incorrigible sense of humor, McMurphy has his greatest triumph when
he sneaks everyone out on a yachting trip. “Exultation,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is
the going / Of an inland soul to sea”; and an entire tradition of lighting out from the
shore, and the prisonhouse of society, is recaptured in this moment. Soon after this,
however, McMurphy – who is increasingly seen as an enemy to the institution,
whom it must repress to survive – has a lobotomy performed on him, reducing him
to a vegetable, passive and compliant. And unwilling to see him like this, finding it
unbearable, his best friend in the institution, an ex-reservation Indian named
Bromden, smothers McMurphy and so takes his life. The smothering is described in
sexual terms because it is an act of love. It is also an act of devotion by a disciple. For,
like some of the inmates, Bromden has grown immeasurably under the influence of
McMurphy. So much so that, after killing his mentor, Bromden breaks out of the
mental institution to go on the road and maybe return to his tribe. McMurphy may
be dead but, evidently, the spirit of rebellion that he embodied still survives.
If McMurphy is the hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, then Bromden
supplies its vision. A giant, schizophrenic Indian who has pretended to be deaf and
dumb to remain as far from the center of activity as possible, he is the narrator. He
is an outsider, an innocent eye in a way like Huck Finn, but what he sees is far
stranger, far more surreal. It may not be literally true but it is symbolically so because,
to quote Emily Dickinson again, “Much madness is divinest sense.” The eye of
Bromden sees the inner truth. He sees the Big Nurse as a nightmare figure, a
mammalian monster and a machine, who can makes the clocks go fast or slow.
She is compared at one point to a cartoon character called the Spider Lady, who
drew her victims into an electrified web. McMurphy, in turn, is likened to heroes
such as Superman. He is an urban cowboy, plain-speaking, hard-living, a gambler
and a risk-taker. Kesey said that he was addicted to comic books, which he called
“the honest American myths.” And here that addiction turns the story into a vivid
mix of naturalism and carnival. Celebrating a kind of anarchic individualism,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has its own anarchic energy. This retelling of the
combat between the self and the system is unique precisely because it carries a comic
book edge, which adds a further touch of subversion. The compelling tropes of what
has been called the American drama of beset manhood are all there: the rebel inGGray_c05.indd 639ray_c 05 .indd 639 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM