As you read
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,
consider the targets of Ken Kesey's narrative: the hospital, with its
emasculating nurse and sadistic orderlies, stifles individual expression
(read male urges) and renders the patients both figuratively and
literally impotent. The novel's "Combine," an allegorical representation
of the oppressive forces of conformity in Kesey's world, and its main
enforcer, Nurse Ratched, systematically prey on the men's neuroses and
alienate them from their own free-spirited natures.
The book has received much criticism (and been
banned in
many schools) for its apparent misogyny (the female characters are
either castrating nurses or prostitutes) and racism (the African
American orderlies are charicatured as cartoonishly sadistic "black
boys"). Do you think such criticisms are fair? What challenges does
having a narrator who is a paranoid schizophrenic, often divorced from
reality, present for the reader?
After the novel won wide acclaim, Kesey became a cultural icon, traveling around the country in a bus with a group called the
Merry Pranksters. How did the novel help usher in the cultural changes that defined the 1960's?
Lucas
Jackson and Randall Patrick McMurphy serve as iconic American heroes,
brazenly defying authority, helping a group of emasculated men recover
some semblence of their manhoods in the face of an oppressive authority.
Moreover, each takes on a Christ-like role, leading his respective
disciples (prisoners or mental patients) toward dignity, suffering and
deteriorating under the burden of leadership, and eventually sacrificing
himself in a selfless defiance of the demand for conformity. Discuss
some of the more interesting parallels between the characters. How do
Kesey and the director/screenwriter of Cool Hand Luke cast their main characters as a religious figures? What significant differences exist between the two?
