fiction
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the residents at a mental facility find themselves thrust
out of their boring routine when a new resident arrives from jail. McMurphy is boisterous, charming, gregarious,
and mischievous and attempts to undermine the authority of the Big Nurse.
I promise you that I had never read this novel or seen the
movie. I know—shame on me. So, I decided
that I should finally get with the program and read the novel. I only knew the barest outline of the story
and that Jack Nicholson played McMurphy in the movie. So I definitely pictured him while listening
to the audiobook. (And I've seen the movie since writing my review!)
The story was engaging and disturbing. Obviously, life in a mental ward was not
likely to be pleasant. And it sounded like several of the staff members were
malicious and, perhaps, sadistic. So,
with that information, when McMurphy arrived, of questionable mental health and
an apparent knack for “reading the room”, the story was suddenly
interesting. The narrator of the novel was
one of the residents who has fooled everyone into believing he is deaf and
mute. However, while the reader
sympathizes with him, we are also made quite aware that he isn’t mentally well
with some definite phobias and paranoia. He is an unreliable narrator. So, the reader is made to feel a bit “off”
while reading about characters who are also a bit “off”, some more than
others. However, mostly, the residents
are simply depressed and defeated men who are uncomfortable in society.
I enjoyed Ken Kesey's writing style. The characters were fantastic but the outcome was doomed
from the start. Aside from the boat outing (which I found to be a highly doubtful
allowable outing for McMurphy since he was supposedly a prisoner), it felt
sadly real. There was certainly a lot of hope in the tale but the underlying
sense of who was really in control was never far away. The takeaway was that
McMurphy brought hope and, even, healing to many of the residents. A
certain degree of justice was served in the end, albeit bittersweet due to the
high price paid.
The narrator, Tom Parker (which is apparently an alias for
Grover Gardner), was very entertaining with excellent voice acting and a decent
repertoire of voices and accents. I give
him an A+ for his efforts.
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