Okay I might be totally insane for thinking this but I find McMurphy to be totally insufferable and so far in the book I don’t think Nurse Ratched has really gone too far with anything she does to the patients. (Obviously excluding the electric shock but a part of me believes she still thinks it has therapeutic value??? I’m not sure)) when I started reading I was expecting a sadistic nurse who tortured her patients but my expectations were way off. To me so far in the book it kind of just seems like she is doing her best to deal with a bunch of mentally ill men and I can understand why that would make her run a bit of a tight ship
by kawaiianimekid
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Here’s another book that was required reading for me in high school and I see it differently some, ah, many decades later!
For one thing, Ken Kesey sure does have women issues, at least in this book…not just Nurse Ratched, but Chief Bromden’s mother being treated like an awful castrating harpy for wanting to keep her maiden name after she married. I know it was much rarer in the early 60’s, but what if Ms. B had good reasons to want to keep her name? Then there was the inmate whose only words were “F*ck the Wife” stuttered out. OFOTCN was published in 1962, which explains a lot of the misogyny, but still.
McMurphy was a career criminal – I think this was his third offense he was in for. Or something, but I know it was more than one. (Also I remember the charge being statutory rape, which had to be quite forcibly on quite a young girl to be taken seriously in that day and age. “But she wanted it” was of course his defense.)
I honestly think it was the product of a time and place, Kesey being a sort of beatnik and hippie figure combined, and a major driver of the counterculture. Figures like McMurphy were really romanticized as wronged by society, in that subculture. Then there was the fact that mental institutions were terrible places and DID need reform. Nurse Ratched was probably overworked and over stressed. What she needed was more staff to help her! Someone to invent anti-psychotics that worked! Mental illness was a stigma and disgrace, and most mental patients were warehoused (if lucky) and lobotomized (if not – poor Rosemary Kennedy). I doubt Ratched took sadistic glee in her job. I bet she haaaated it.
Cuckoo’s Nest helped push psychiatric institutional reform – and the ideas and motivations were noble, as in treat mentally ill people decently and don’t warehouse them, but…by our standards now, McMurphy is not a very sympathetic protagonist. I know the book runs on allegory and metaphor, but I’m left saying, “Of course institutions are terrible! Of course the mentally ill deserve decent treatment! But is a rebellion led by a rather scummy guy the way to go about it?”
You must still be in highschool.
Anyway, finish the book.