One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Classics)
by Ken Kesey
List Price:
Our Price: $6.93
You Save: $8.07 (54%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $5.75 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Ken KeseyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-12-31
ISBN: 0141181222
Number of pages: 312
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780141181226
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: Insanity is Power
Summary: 5 Stars
Kesey creates a world that should be surprisingly dissimilar to our own, but is not. The setting is located almost completely in a mental hospital. The world that is described might as well be the mirror image of our own society. His style and his relationship with the characters that he picks apart for us is astonishing.
Kesey is an amazing writer who digs deep into the character of "Chief" Bromden. He hints lightly at the experiments of the past and of the future that were performed and would be performed on patients in mental facilities around the world. One of the most common hints is to frontal lobotomies which becomes significant much later in the story. The horrid concept of a lobotomy is also accompanied by general authorial gestures to disorders. Some are obvious like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder while others can only be guessed at. The world outside the mental hospital, which tends not to be much different form the inside, is populated by nature but also a definitive presence of repetition, stagnation, annexation of creativity, and replicas. This theme is represented in the system that the mental hospital is run as.
Our narrator, "Chief" Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb so that he can secretly acquire information during his stay, which is inexplicably long, on the ward. Unfortunately, what he does with that information is nothing. Even when McMurphy arrives and he begins to drag Bromden out of his shell he continues to stay quiet about the intel he gathers. He is quiet, sensitive to his surroundings when he's not hallucinating, yet unreliable because he cannot, at first, tell what is reality and what isn't. Frankly, I believe that this is never actually resolved since reality is a perspective, like an opinion, that not everybody shares the same truths to. At first he hallucinates repeatedly to escape from the problems of this world, the ward, and says at one point "You were safe from the enemy, but you were awfully alone." McMurphy, however, would change that.
Before getting into that, however, the system should be reviewed. The system should be run by the doctor but is instead run by the Big Nurse. Three "black boy's" are like her henchmen in the process. The boy's work like a tripod and can rarely function without the help of the other two. They are sinister but it's made clear that they should not be. The system outside of the mental hospital and the system inside run by Nurse Ratched created them.
Nurse Ratched is and should be hated by the reader. There is this love/fear/hate of Nurse Ratched when it comes to the perspective of the incarcerated psychotics on the ward. However, she is, in total, to be hated. She has a false smile slapped on her face constantly, embodies machinery and ice imagery, and encourages betrayal and absolute order on her ward. She digs into the minds of the weak like a needle and wiggles around in there until the world complies to her. However, Bromden and many of the other men on the ward soon realize that she should be pitied. It's a fleeting thought, but she should. She, like the black boys and the actual "psychotics", is a product of society. A product of the system. One of her main problems is that she tries to hide and subvert her feminism to get by in a masculine world and to hold all the power. She knows no other way of existing and that, in of itself, is sad. In a more obscure fashion, McMurphy attempts to not only help the men on the ward but also Nurse Ratched. She just fails to listen.
All this talk about a McMurphy character! He is our cure. He is what we secretly wish to be but can never have the courage or the strength to become. He looks at a system and laughs at it. He can show you who you are and never be wrong about it. He sees past the fogs of life to the point of the matter and drags it to the surface kicking and screaming because true reality is the ability to look at yourself and accept. He, unlike the system, is constantly moving and sociable. He does not stay stagnant and has this zest and rambunctious attitude that makes us wish we were kids again. His smile counteracts and ridicules Nurse Ratched's while reaffirming his stance on life.
Kesey does not speak of nature much in this novel. Nature is only painted during a few scenes and it is normally beautiful. McMurphy is the representation of nature throughout all other scenes. He is, literally, a force of nature. He is chaotic, unpredictable, often calm, sometimes storming, and he makes SENSE. In an insane world he is the pivotal point in which truth can be found. Because of this he turns into the father figure on the ward. It would not be a stretch to say he is Jesus-like. The boat scene is where he has 12 members following him, like 12 disciples, and he smiles and laughs watching them come into their own skin and realize their own potential. The men begin to depend on him and only at the last is their self-dependence being seen in the other characters. In truth, he helps them to stand on their own so that his bigness, as Bromden would put it, could be transferred to the others. Then they can make it their own and become who they need to be.
The novel is replete with descriptions worth rereading ten times over and a sense of awe and degradation and hope that is rarely combined in such an eloquent fashion. It follows a trend like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and moves at about the same pace. Dystopia moves to Utopia but not without its losses and pain.
Summary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Penguin Classics)
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey?s One Flew Over the Cuckoo?s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy?s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.
This edition includes a new foreword by Kesey, a new text introduction by Robert Faggen, and line drawings the author made when writing the book, many never before published.
Classics Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Classics Books
Native sonby Richard Wright
Perennial Library; Published: 1987; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.75
Native Son: And How Bigger Was Bornby Richard Wright
Perennial; Published: 1993-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $60.00
Raphael and the Noble Taskby Catherine Salton
Harper; Published: 2000-10-24; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.49
Price in other shops:
Island (Perennial Classics)by Aldous Huxley
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2002-07-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops:
A Tree Grows in Brooklynby Betty Smith
Harper; Published: 2001-11-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.86
Price in other shops:
The Great Divorce CDby C. S. Lewis
HarperAudio; Published: 2003-11-25; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $13.06
Price in other shops:
Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens
Macmillan Pub Co; Published: 1979-06; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
This Side of Paradiseby Fitzgerald
Scribner Paper Fiction; Published: 1988-09-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.95
Price in other shops:
Black Coffee (Poirot)by Agatha Christie
Harper Collins Pb; Published: 2002-12-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $68.32
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1960s)by Joan Didion
Flamingo; Published: 2001-04-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $22.25
Similar Books and other products
Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novelby Kurt Vonnegut
Dial Press Trade Paperback; Published: 1999-01-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.46
Price in other shops:
Sometimes a Great Notion (Penguin Classics)by Ken Kesey
Penguin Classics; Published: 2006-08-29; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.49
Price in other shops:
Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Third Edition (Beginnings)by Peter Barry
Manchester University Press; Published: 2009-03-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.43
Price in other shops:
A Separate Peaceby John Knowles
Scribner; Published: 2003-10-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.98
Price in other shops:
I Know Why the Caged Bird Singsby Maya Angelou
Ballantine Books; Published: 2009-04-21; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.51
Price in other shops:
The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Textby William Faulkner
Vintage; Published: 1990-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
Different Seasons (Signet)by Stephen King
Signet; Published: 1983-08-29; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.88
Price in other shops:
Fight Club: A Novelby Chuck Palahniuk
W. W. Norton; Published: 2005-10-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.90
Price in other shops:
Erasure: A Novelby Percival Everett
Graywolf Press; Published: 2011-10-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.93
Price in other shops:
The Bell Jarby Sylvia Plath
Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Published: 2006-10-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.99
Price in other shops: