One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Book

Profane, hilarious, disturbing, heartbreaking, shocking - powerful.

Ken Kesey's genre defining 1962 novel that was made into a Broadway play and then made into an Academy Award winning film starring Jack Nicholson will inspire strong emotions. I can see people loving it or hating it.

I loved it.

First of all, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart: a book that is banned from libraries has a place on my bookshelf.

So all you amateur censurers out there - you are my enemy. I don't like you. I defy you. A book that you don't like is a book that I do and I want to rub it in your face.

This from Wikipedia:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of America's most highly challenged and banned novels.

• 1974: Five residents of Strongsville, Ohio sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. They deemed the book "pornographic" and said that it "glorifies criminal activity, has a tendency to corrupt juveniles, and contains descriptions of bestiality, bizarre violence, and torture, dismemberment, death, and human elimination".

• 1975: The book was removed from public schools in Randolph, New York and Alton, Oklahoma.

• 1977: Removed from the required reading list in Westport, Maine.

• 1978: Banned from the St. Anthony, Idaho Freemont High School and the teacher who assigned the novel was fired.

• 1982: Challenged at Merrimack, New Hampshire High School.

• 1986: Challenged at Aberdeen Washington High school in Honors English classes.
2000: Challenged at Placentia Unified School District (Yorba Linda, California). Parents say that the teachers could "choose the best books, but they keep choosing this garbage over and over again".

The teacher who assigned this as reading was FIRED??? The year 2000? The year 2000??? We are in the 21st century and someone is calling this garbage??

Ok.

First of all, McMurphy is alive.

"Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing."

The dramatic tension between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched was literary diamonds - rare treasure. Kesey created a novel wherein was a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Clash! That's what it was and a reader could see it coming from a mile down the tracks, like a freight train whistling and steaming. Here it comes.

McMurphy was the novel's tragic hero - a red headed Irish American troublemaker who everyone loves deep down. The Big Nurse - Mildred Ratched, is the Man. She is the embodiment of the institution, the rules, the law, the Order. Kesey has drawn an epic clash between chaos and order and did so within the halls and bleached clean walls of an insane asylum.

Though I could not help picturing Jack Nicholson as McMurphy while reading this, Kesey's McMurphy is really described more like Charles Dickens' Fagan, a red headed trickster, and perhaps in mythic terms he is Coyote, or Loki, he is THE TRICKSTER GOD, he is that opposing force that makes the orderly way of the universe stronger.

"Rules? PISS ON YOUR FUCKING RULES!"

In another way, McMurphy is the quintessential American, and he can be seen as a metaphor for the spirit of America. He is the entrepreneur, the self-starter, the untamed rebel who makes his own rules. He is the great equalizer, the leader who kicks down the boundaries, who champions the little guy, who colors outside the lines and who picks the small boys and the fat kids on his team and then wins anyway and wins big.

"All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down."

Kesey's narrator is also an unlikely selection: Chief Bromden, nicknamed Chief Broom because he is made to sweep the halls. A giant of a man, the rational, modern world has emasculated him, made him small and without a voice or strength. Chief is clearly schizophrenic but also lucid, he and the other patients are humans, deserving of respect and sympathy; one of the central points made by Kesey, who is as humanist as Kurt Vonnegut and as fun as a barrel full of monkeys. Chief's dramatic and dynamic evolution is the barometer of this great work.

The Chronics and acutes. When McMurphy arrives at the institute, the residents are informally divided between the chronics - those whose condition has demanded their lifelong commitment; and the acutes, those whose insanity may be temporary and remedied. Interestingly, many are there voluntarily. McMurphy's friendship with Chief (an erstwhile chronic) and his championing of the acutes status is a central theme of the book.

"What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it. "

Like Upton Sinclair's muckraking journalistic exposures in The Jungle, Kesey's novel can also be seen as a bright light shined on the mental health facilities in the 60s.

"He Who Marches Out Of Step Hears Another Drum"

A book that should be read.