"Cliff Notes - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

BARRON'S BOOK NOTES
KEN KESEY'S
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST


It is the destiny of some writers to be linked forever with the era that gave them fame. F. Scott Fitzgerald inevitably evokes the 1920s heady mix of jazz and exuberant youth, dinner-jacketed elegance and corrupted dreams. The years just after World War II, when Americans in bustling cities and velvet-lawned suburbs found their new affluence somehow more disturbing than deserved, belong in the same way to John Cheever. So it is with Ken Kesey and the 1960s. Thanks not only to his own writings, but to the writings about him--accounts of chemically heightened days, mystical pronouncements, sudden disappearances and frequent arrests, in newspapers, magazines and especially in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test--Kesey has become a symbol of those years when a generation believed they could alter their consciousness and the consciousness of a nation through drugs, sex, and noisy rebellion against society rules. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kesey's first novel, published in 1962 when he was only 26, earned unusual critical and popular acclaim. Throughout the decade it was one of the books most likely to be found in college dorm rooms across the country, perhaps lodged on a cinder block and plywood bookshelf between Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.

In some ways Kesey may seem an odd candidate for the combination of court jester, pop messiah and serious novelist he eventually became, for on the surface, his boyhood had a Norman Rockwell, straightarrow wholesomeness to it. Born in La Junta, Colorado, in 1935, Kesey moved when still young with his family to Oregon, the setting for his two novels. His father, a dairyman, taught him the love of the outdoors that is manifest in Cuckoo's Nest and in his second book, Sometimes a Great Notion. Voted "Most Likely to Succeed" in his class at Springfield High School, Kesey went on to attend the University of Oregon, where he was a star both on the wrestling team and in the Drama Department. Writing, however, was becoming his major interest. His initial efforts were short stories, but after graduation he attempted a novel, which remains unpublished. In 1959, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled him to enter the creative writing program at Stanford University.

At Stanford, Kesey studied under writers Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, and Malcolm Cowley, but his life outside the classroom influenced his writing as much as his studies. San Francisco, with its bohemian North Beach district and its reputation as a tolerant nesting-place for beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac, lay only forty miles to the north. Kesey and some kindred spirits formed their own satellite artists' colony adjacent to Stanford, on Perry Lane in Menlo Park. There they wrote, and at the same time experimented with practices--notably drug use--that in a few years' time would, for better or for worse, be disrupting lives across America. Kesey's access to mind-altering substances was made easier when he volunteered for experiments being performed at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital. There he was given psychedelic drugs, including the little-known LSD, while doctors noted the drugs' effects on him. When the experiments ended, Kesey remained at the hospital, employed now as a psychiatric aide.

Both the drug experiments and the job had an enormous effect on Kesey's writing. He abandoned the novel he had been working on and started a new one, set in a mental hospital--the book that was to become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. His experience as a psychiatric aide gave him insight into the workings of the hospital; many of the Acutes and Chronics described in the novel are thinly-fictionalized versions of patients he saw at the VA, and he even went so far as to arrange a sample electro-shock therapy for himself to see what the treatment was actually like. As for the drug experiments, it was his experience with hallucinogens that let him write so vividly from a schizophrenic's point of view: Chief Bromden's ominous dreams of fog and machinery have their roots in Kesey's own LSD and peyote-induced visions.

Cuckoo's Nest met with critical praise seldom lavished on first novels. "A great new American novelist," said Jack Kerouac, the beat poet whose life and work had profoundly influenced Kesey. The distinguished critic Mark Schorer termed the book "a smashing achievement." And it was a financial success sufficient to allow Kesey two years to research and write his next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The story of a family of Oregon loggers as fiercely individualistic as Randall McMurphy, it is a more ambitious novel than Kesey's first but perhaps less successful. It was made into a motion picture in 1971. After Notion's publication in 1964, Kesey embarked on what was to be an extremely extended vacation, functioning less as a writer than as one of the public entertainers who helped to usher in the Aquarian Age. As recounted in Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey and his band of "Merry Pranksters" travelled the nation in a psychedelically painted bus, ingested large quantities of drugs, and in general made themselves an almost irresistible target to those groups, like the police, unwilling to tolerate such rambunctious attacks on social conventions. Kesey was arrested three times for possession of marijuana, fled to Mexico after faking a suicide note, and, on his return to California, served five months in jail.

Upon his release, he returned to Oregon to farm and to write, and there, except for sojourns to England and Egypt, he has remained. In 1973, he published a group of short pieces, Kesey's Garage Sale. Subsequently he worked on a new novel, portions of which appeared in the magazine Esquire.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest remained widely read and studied well after its publication. A play based on the novel enjoyed long runs off-Broadway and in many parts of the country; the movie made from it (over Kesey's protests) in 1975 garnered all five major Academy Awards, the first film to achieve that feat in nearly 40 years. Clearly, something about the tale of McMurphy and Nurse Ratched fighting for the souls of the Chief and the other patients generates a powerful appeal. Perhaps some of that appeal lies in the book's fast-paced, comic-strip humor, and in the comic-strip simplicity of its distinctions between good and evil. More seriously, the book's message--that one must never be afraid to laugh, nor to rebel against a society that values efficiency and conformity above people--has not staled: it may be more to the point now than it was in 1962. And, despite McMurphy's defeat, this message, too, is a curiously satisfying, optimistic and American one, for it suggests that though the battle will be difficult and will claim some victims, there is a chance it can be won. We see that in Chief Bromden's leap from the ward window out into a world where men can be free.


^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: THE PLOT

A half-Indian named Chief Bromden begins telling us of his experiences in an Oregon mental hospital. His disturbed mind teems with machine-obsessed hallucinations, yet these hallucinations reveal a deeper truth: far from being a place of healing, the hospital is a place of fear. Head of his ward is Nurse Ratched, a woman of great self-control, who, in the Chief's view, is the most powerful of the hospital's mechanical instruments. Only her large breasts betray the fact that she is a human being, and these she has hidden beneath her uniform. The Chief has convinced everyone that he is deaf and dumb; he tries to flee reality by thinking back to his happy childhood in an Indian village. But his dread of a sinister force called the Combine shatters his memories, and in moments of greatest stress a thick fog entirely clouds his mind.

A new patient is admitted: Randall Patrick McMurphy, a loud, red-headed braggart claiming to be in the hospital only to enjoy an easier life than he had at a state work farm. He doesn't seem crazy: with his tales of fighting, gambling, and love-making, he brings laughter into the ward for the first time in years. Immediately he tries to make friends with the other patients, among them shy, stuttering Billy Bibbit, and Dale Harding, an intelligent man ashamed of his effeminacy.

The Nurse and her new patient are in every way opposed to each other, she demanding control, he reveling in freedom. Inevitably, as the Nurse asserts her power, McMurphy rebels against it, not yet realizing rebellion may be dangerous. Nurse Ratched has defeated past troublemakers with electro-shock therapy, or with lobotomies--the latter an operation that makes patients docile members of society at the expense of their individuality.

At the daily Group Meeting, McMurphy is appalled at the way Nurse Ratched destroys her patients' self-confidence, in particular their sexual self-confidence--especially devastating because he believes freely expressed sexuality is a key to a healthy life. He bets Harding and the others that he can make the Nurse lose control of the ward without giving her an excuse to punish him.

McMurphy's often funny skirmishes with the Nurse and her staff entertain the patients; increasingly, he reminds the Chief of his father, a full-blooded Indian Chief who also used laughter to fight his enemies. But when McMurphy proposes that the patients be allowed to watch the World Series on television, only one, Cheswick, sides with him. Disgusted at this timidity, McMurphy demonstrates how he might escape by tossing a control panel through a window. He fails, but his nerve inspires the group to vote with him at the next meeting. Needing one more vote, he approaches the Chief, who, fearful of the freedom McMurphy offers, is cowering in a mental fog so thick it threatens to engulf him forever. McMurphy's force of personality pulls the Chief out of his illness. While the Nurse sill refuses to let them watch the Series, McMurphy wins a point by making her lose control of her temper.

Soon, however, McMurphy learns a painful truth: he will not leave the hospital until Nurse Ratched agrees to release him. Nervously, he begins to obey her rules. But by raising hopes he hasn't fulfilled, McMurphy has left the patients worse off than before. Cheswick becomes so depressed he drowns himself. McMurphy's sense of entrapment grows when he learns that, unlike himself, most of the other patients have voluntarily committed themselves to the hospital. Determined to destroy the fear that's been hammered into them--and in him--he smashes the Nurse's Station window, a symbol of Nurse Ratched's control.

Basking in the glory of another victory, McMurphy arranges a fishing trip for the ward. Long suspecting the Chief can talk and hear, McMurphy speaks to him, and the Chief breaks years of silence to answer. He describes the Combine: people like Nurse Ratched, the government, his own mother, who destroy tradition, nature, and freedom in favor of machinelike conformity. As it did to his father, the Combine has made the Chief "small"--for in his mind psychological defeat creates physical diminution. McMurphy strikes a deal: if the Chief promises to grow large enough to lift the control panel McMurphy could not, McMurphy will let him go on the fishing trip for free.

Out on the ocean, far from the influence of Nurse Ratched, the patients prove they are more capable, more sane than they ever suspected. McMurphy arranges a date between Billy Bibbit and a prostitute, Candy Starr. But on the drive home, the Chief notices that the hospital has worn McMurphy down just as the patients he helped are growing stronger.

Nurse Ratched now turns McMurphy's skill as a gambler against him, convincing the ward's patients he came not to help them but to win their money. McMurphy realizes he must act like the hero the patients require: when an aide abuses one of the patients, George Sorenson, in the shower, McMurphy feels forced to go to George's defense. The Chief joins the fight, and he and McMurphy are sent for electroshock treatments.

As McMurphy is strapped to the treatment table, a parallel is drawn between him and Christ: both have sacrificed themselves for others. During the Chief's treatment, he remembers the forces that brought him to the hospital: World War II, his mother's disrespect for his father, the destruction of his Indian village for a government dam. He remembers the childhood rhyme that gives the book its name and that hints at possible freedom. McMurphy has made him strong enough to withstand the shock treatments: the Chief will never again hide in the fog.

On McMurphy's return, the patients plan his escape, but he insists on waiting until Billy Bibbit has his date with Candy. Billy, prevented from growing up by a domineering mother, will become a man by losing his virginity. When Candy and another prostitute, Sandy, arrive, the ward erupts in a wild party. McMurphy has suffered too much damage during his stay in the hospital, and he's too weary to attempt to escape when the Nurse arrives in the morning. Billy is discovered with Candy, and Nurse Ratched plays on his guilt feelings until he is once again a stuttering, helpless child. Ashamed, Billy commits suicide by slitting his throat.

The Chief realizes that in the last weeks McMurphy's sole reason for living has been the other patients' needs for him. Now McMurphy makes his last stand, attacking Nurse Ratched. After this humiliation, she will never again regain control of the ward: her face has shown too much fear, her ripped uniform revealed the breasts that prove she isn't an all-powerful machine but a woman.

McMurphy will never know his victory, though. His example has given the patients enough courage to brave the outside world, but he returns from a lobotomy a ruined man. The Chief will not let his friend remain in this pathetic condition, and he smothers him with a pillow. Then he goes to the control panel, which, thanks to McMurphy, he is now "big" enough to lift, hurls it through a window and escapes.


^^^^^^^^^^ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST: MCMURPHY