One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Published in 1962, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of a controlling nurse in a mental institute and a patient rebellion against her. The novel is based on the experiences author Ken Kesey had while working as an orderly in a mental institution in Menlo Park, California. In order to better understand the experiences of people in a mental institute, Kesey actually subjected himself to electroshock therapy (a form of treatment for the mentally ill, also called electroconvulsive therapy) and took many of their prescription drugs. After Kesey published the novel, it was made into a Broadway play and later a film starring Jack Nicholson.

Rules are good, right? Rules rule. Without things like stop lights and driving etiquette, we’d be one disaster-prone society. When we’re in kindergarten, we learn how to color in the lines and paint-by-numbers, because we might be told that pretty pictures are those that are neat and tidy. We have terms like, “good” and “sane” and “insane,” because these words help us keep our lives organized and mess-free. It’s like having lots of buckets with various labels, and when something comes along that's not what we expected (like when a six-year-old paints a picture of a green sky and blue grass), we just might think of it as “incorrect." No need debate it or get into messy arguments.

But One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest challenges all of that. It makes us look at who makes the rules. Now we want to know: who decides what a pretty picture looks like? Who defines what behavior is "sane" or "insane"? McMurphy helps us realize just how arbitrary "sanity" can be, especially when the poster child of sanity happens to be the one and only Nurse Ratched. So just what does it mean to be "sane" or "normal" and to have all of your ducks in a row?