by Bridget N. Watts

Created on: January 25, 2010

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a 1962 novel written by Ken Kesey, which in 1975 was made into an award-winning movie of the same name starring Jack Nickelson. It tells the story of a group of men in a mental institution during the 1950’s, a time during which you really did not want to be send to an asylum. The patients are trapped inside the mental institution with electro-shock therapy as a valid means of treating most disorders or even disorderly behavior.

The story of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is told by Chief, an enormous schizophrenic Native American who spent years in the asylum pretending to be deaf and mute. The all-male asylum is run by Nurse Ratched, a horrible stiff and tyrannical woman, and her black orderlies.

Everyday life is very boring and depressing in the asylum, until one day they get a new patient named Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy is a rebellious happy-go-lucky kind of guy, who has faked insanity in order to serve out his prison sentence for battery in the mental hospital.

Seeing how bad things are at the asylum, McMurphy takes it upon himself to lighten things up and make staying there more fun for himself and the other patients. Of course, this is not how Nurse Ratched sees it, as his constant attempts to upset the sacred and boring routine of daily life at the asylum annoy her a lot. McMurphy organizes things like a ward’s basketball team, a supervised fishing trip, playing cards on the ward, and he even tries to have a vote to watch the World Series on television.

One day he is bored and decides to have a bet whether or not he can lift a heavy control panel in the shower room. Of course, he fails, but all the other patients are really impressed by his efforts. He even gets Chief to open up to him and admit that he can really speak and hear, but is only pretending to be a mute. Nurse Ratched is tired of McMurphy challenging her authority and making the other patients misbehave, and she is waiting for an excuse to be able to really discipline him.

The perfect opportunity for this arises when one night, McMurphy smuggles two prostitutes and a few bottles of liquor into the asylum. They have a bit of a party with some of the other patients, and McMurphy convinces one of the prostitutes to seduce Billy Bibbit, a shy and insecure boy with a terrible stutter.

Things get a little out of hand and when the morning shift arrives, they haven’t even cleaned up their mess yet. Upon being found with a prostitute, and having Nurse Ratched threaten to tell his mother, Billy is so mortified and scared that he commits suicide.

Nurse Ratched tries to blame McMurphy for Billy’s dead, when really she is the one to blame with her taunting Billy. McMurphy sees it the same way and tries to strangle Nurse Ratched. He fails and that is when they decide to give him a lobotomy.

When he comes back to the ward he is not much more than a vegetable. Chief realizes that the other patients should not see McMurphy in the state he is in, and he also feels he should put McMurphy out of his misery, therefore he decides to suffocate him with a pillow. Chief then lifts the heavy control panel that no one was able to lift, throws it through a window and escapes.

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