One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest Motif: Chief's Fog visions

Introduction

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) portrays sexual mythology as a primary motif in the individual's struggle for consciousness and to become free from institutional oppression in contemporary America. The use of a “schizophrenic episode” as a central stylistic and thematic device illustrates Kesey's idealized perception of modern heroism. Kesey portrays our national ideology of virile heroism in a story of democracy's triumph in true brotherhood. Two men, Chief Bromden and Randle Patrick McMurphy, come to love each other profoundly. Herein is the novel's radical departure from tradition(Baurecht,William,pp 270-287).

Discussion

The novel dramatizes a resurrection ritual through the narrator's schizophrenic episode. Kesey's central consciousness, Broom, is first of all a victim of racism. He is rescued by McMurphy, a messiah who shows him and the men in the ward the “way home.” Chief Bromden repeatedly creates his own womb when he withdraws into his fog, wherein he is finally purified by the love of his messiah. Haunted by an image of his “giant” father, Broom must learn to accept his father as chief and refuse to replicate his father's dissipation from that “giant” into the racist culture's expected image of an alcoholic Indian. Broom's centering episode is in his discovery of true and unrestrained love for another male.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a distinctly American novel because it is clear that no other culture could have produced it, given the novel's distinct mythology and ethos derived from the Western. Ken Kesey's work graphically portrays American masculinity snared in its myth of individual possibility, i.e. rugged individualism. Myth is a multifaceted cultural and psychic phenomenon. In this essay I use “myth” both to mean a fiction or half-truth which so captivates one's emotions that it becomes a religious verity and (in Richard Slotkin's words) an “intelligible mask of that enigma called the 'national character.'” The American democratic dream rendersone equal in potentia to all others(Baurecht,William,1982,pp 279-298).

Love, not power, glory, machismo, or the masculine imperial will, is the key to the meaning of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as an expression of a national male mythology. Climaxing in McMurphy's attack on Big Nurse, he totally forgets himself in his act of love for the men in the ward. His momentary insanity, in the vain attempt to exact revenge for Billy Bibbit's death, underscores the prevalence of injustice in ...