One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

"Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey's extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness."

I have a love/hate relationship with this book. The writing and imagery are superb and I always love a "down with tyrannical overloads, generic living, and medicalization" moral. The finding of your own self worth and inner strength and excepting your own flaws.  However its other lesson leaves me cringing and the first half of the book dragged. In the basic knowledge I have of Ken Kesey, the book ultimately seems very misogynistic.

The plot seems to involve men mentally castrated by a domineering woman who could just as easily be labelled "Bitch" as she could "Big Nurse." Enter main character, McMurphy who is a man that pretty much shakes the men up to the supposed feminization of American culture and how it's destroying their identities as males. (Read here: a huge characterization of the male ego is to dominate the female with opposites all around.)

How is this man so easily labelled a hero? While his escapades are humorous and his bolstering of his friends admirable have we forgotten he has been charged and convicted, among other things, with rape of a female minor and the main reason he's in the asylum is to skimp out on his prison sentence? How is that "masculine," if I am to continue on with the stereotypes the book itself perpetuates--and yet backpedals when necessary? Why do we consider him the "main character" when the story is being told in the first person by a Native American who shows the largest amount of humanity, morality and in the end bravery and compassion?
Maybe because 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 colours outside the lines and who picks the small boys and the fat kids on his team and then wins anyway and wins big.

 An interesting and eye opening read. Funny and heart warming at times, tragic and bittersweet at others.

Age Rating 15+. Drinking, shock therapy and uncomfortable subject matter.