One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- Is it an allegory?

[tblue]

Or am I reading too much into it? I've been thinking it's about a willingly complacent society ruled by a ruthless, powerful force that controls and manipulates, and destroys free will. Am I close?

[velvet]

1. Sounds plausible

It's been a long time since I read this book, you have me thinking it would be worth re-reading now some twenty years on and see what I find in it.

[Orrex]

2. I once knew someone with an allegory to peanuts and shellfish.

[Boojatta]

5. As you probably know, the words "allegory" and "allergy" refer to different concepts.

Was there something about tblue's original message in this thread that hit too close to home, or otherwise rubbed your fur the wrong way?

[Orrex]

10. In colllege I dated a woman who was really good at gelato

[MiddleFingerMom]

13. Thanks, Orrex -- but that's...

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...a little too much information.
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[Boojatta]

15. F once dated a woman who was very good at...

:dilemma:

[MiddleFingerMom]

11. I don't think I could live without my...

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...shrimpfernutter sandwiches.
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Though if I had an allergy to both, I might just blow up and literally EXPLODE!!!!!!
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Then I'd be allergic and allgory alright.

[RandomThoughts]

3. One of my favorite movies.

It is where I learned that sometimes someone must throw the kitchen sink also.


I am surprised someone noticed the comparison between Chief speaking and the girl from the movie three fugitives.

It is rare that people make that connection and think on Chief also being a 'guidance' character in that movie.

Sorta the Ent idea, doesn't do much, but when he does it makes a difference. And in some way I see both Jack's character and the Chief breaking out of the window in the ending scene, sorta like the dove in Blade runner.

Jack set Chief free, and in my view was with him when he left.

Chief did not kill Jack, the Lobotomy tried to kill what he was. And Jack never gave up or stopped fighting.


Anyone notice the gum also?



AC/DC - Thunderstruck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvoeeq-BH4w

[MilesColtrane]

4. I don't know, but there are some days I'd like the Chief to take me out with a pillow.

Actually, I think Kesey wanted to create a microcosm of a ruthless system that controls people with such subtlety that they don't even know they're being manipulated.

[RandomThoughts]

6. There is a fine line from manipulation and hints.

For instance if you see it, then decide if you want to make the next connection in the flow, that is a choice, if you don't see any of it you can be manipulated.

Also the subtle hints can be played back on themselves by context, so it is really interesting how manipulators try to control the flow of something, and how it can instead branch in many ways.


I find that fascinating.

[tblue]

18. LOL. Me, too, sometimes.

I think you're right.

[Mopar151]

7. Coupla things

A) Ken keysey was doing prodigious amounts of LSD (1000 mcg/day!) when he wrote Cuckoo's Nest.
B) The book is largely POV from The Cheif, and he's crazy - but it may be he's crazy enough to see the truth.
C) The Big Nurse is criminally insane, and murders with impunity

[SCantiGOP]

8. Yes and no

I thought Kesey had spent time in an institution, but he worked in one. See the Wiki link and excerpt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey

The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

9. I thought that WAS the interpretation from the moment I saw it.

[applegrove]

12. No it is about a psychopath who turns everyone against the medical staff. Leading

to the wake up of a giant.

[Parche]

14. i just watched that..

jack nicholson is my favorite actor......rp mcmurphy>:rofl::hi::woohoo:

[Tommy_Carcetti]

16. More like a parable.

Or a pun--a play on words!

[struggle4progress]

17. Kesey's 1962 novel certainly did suggest a commentary about the larger world outside

the walls of psychiatric institutions, but as suggested by others in this thread it may also have been motivated by outrage about the psychiatric institutions themselves

That inmates were (and sometimes still are) mistreated is commonplace knowledge now. But the nature of the outrages was not so well-known then. Frederick Wiseman's 1967 documentary Titicut Follies, probably the only film ever actually banned in the US, exhibits treatment of patients (at the Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts) that will seem entirely familiar to Kesey's readers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies

Lobotomy was still a common procedure when Kesey's book was published, though there was growing concern. The Soviets had banned procedure a decade earlier. As a "therapeutic" intervention, after destroying perhaps 100K lives, it largely vanished worldwide before the end of the decade. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

The subtext, that the staff of the hospital are not competent to judge who is sane and who is not, later became the topic of some professional study. Rosenhan, for example, carefully arranged for a number of perfectly normal people to be admitted as patients to psychiatric institutions, and showed that staff would then interpret the most ordinary behaviors as symptoms of mental illness:

Science 19 January 1973:
Vol. 179. no. 4070, pp. 250 - 258 ...
On Being Sane in Insane Places
D. L. Rosenhan 1
1 Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment—the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling—seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic ....

... Clearly, to the extent that we refrain from sending the distressed to insane places, our impressions of them are less likely to be distorted. (The risk of distorted perceptions, it seems to me, is always present, since we are much more sensitive to an individual's behaviors and verbalizations than we are to the subtle contextual stimuli that often promote them ... ) ...

I and the other pseudopatients in the psychiatric setting had distinctly negative reactions. We do not pretend to describe the subjective experiences of true patients. Theirs may be different from ours, particularly with the passage of time and the necessary process of adaptation to one's environment. But we can and do speak to the relatively more objective indices of treatment within the hospital. It could be a mistake, and a very unfortunate one, to consider that what happened to us derived from malice or stupidity on the part of the staff. Quite the contrary, our overwhelming impression of them was of people who really cared, who were committed and who were uncommonly intelligent. Where they failed, as they sometimes did painfully, it would be more accurate to attribute those failures to the environment in which they, too, found themselves than to personal callousness. Their perceptions and behavior were controlled by the situation, rather than being motivated by a malicious disposition. In a more benign environment, one that was less attached to global diagnosis, their behaviors and judgments might have been more benign and effective.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/179/4070/250

[tblue]

19. So, I got it and watched it again last night, after many years.

Wow, does it hold up. Beautiful, heart-wrenching story and superb acting all around. The line between sanity and insanity is nebulous at best. It's relative, really. Nurse Ratched was insane in her own cruel, cold, calculating way. I think it is about power and submission, like a lot of you said.

[The Midway Rebel]

20. The inmates are running the asylum.

The truly crazy motherfuckers are in charge of everything. The rest of us are a bunch of R. P. McMurphys trying to have a good time, get some poon-tang and avoid short lives of hard labor. Man against the machine. That is the allegory. It is as pertinent today as when Kesey wrote it.

[wickerwoman]

21. **English Nazi Alert**

So, so sorry to do this, but I learned this crap in grad school and feel compelled to put it to use at least once before I die.

An allegory involves a pretty much once one-to-one correlation between a character in the book and either a real person or an abstract concept. So, for example, in The Pilgrim's Progress you have characters like "Christian" who is captured by the "Giant Despair" and taken to "Doubting Castle". Or in the Delacroix painting "Liberty Leading the People", Liberty is personified as a woman carrying a flag. The West Wing was sometimes allegorical in that it was obvious that a particular person was John McCain in a particular situation that was a thinly masked version of Katrina.

In an allegorical reading of Lord of the Rings, Sauron=Hitler, Nazgul=Nazis, Theoden=Neville Chamberlain, etc. Tolkein explicitly rejected allegorical readings because he thought they were too reductionist. Obviously there are parallels between the book and historic events, but there isn't an intentional one-to-one lining up that you are expected to spot straight away (and thus get the "right" take-home message.)

I think you're seeing the book more as a metaphor, which can link one abstract concept to another. Nurse Ratchet's obsessive need to control her patients is a metaphor for society's smiling manipulation and oppression. McMurphy's rebellion is a metaphor for the rage of the emasculated working man in post-industrial society, etc. But you can't really say Nurse Ratchet=Nixon and McMurphy=Malcolm X. So in that sense, it's not a true allegory.

But I do agree with your reading otherwise. :hi:

[Odin2005]

22. Nurse Ratchet's controling behavior left a deep impression on me.

It reminds me of all the people that think those of us on the Autism spectrum are "broken" and need to be "fixed". Alternative forms of human cognition are "disordered" are need to be "eliminated" and all that BS. Same with people with ADD and Dyslexia. And even a very mild form of Schizophrenia called Schizotypal Personality Disorder, which fits a lot of loony but very creative individuals (I suspect Socrates was Schizotypal).

The "Normal" people want us "freaks" to disappear so their boring pseudo-reality is not disturbed.

[RandomThoughts]

23. Interestingly the symptoms for schizophrenia

Include obsession with numbers, and delusions of grandeur.

Bankers?

[Odin2005]

24. Nah, sociopathy is more likely.

But I'm sure a lot of the working-stiff accountants have autistic traits. My mom's dad was likely on the spectrum and he was a number-cruncher at a then regional bank in the 40s through his death in the 70s.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

25. The question is "Who's crazy???"

The lively, animated Randall Patrick McMurphy, or the controlling, rigid Nurse Ratched to whom the most important thing is THE RULES.

[RandomThoughts]

26. Great comment.

But in following the rules, she also incorporates self advantage, the vote for what was on tv. Jack's character tried to play along with the rules, won the vote, and she changed the rules.

In that case he is freed from any of her rules. Since at that point, although it seems she is trying to follow rules, really she is trying to set some advantage for herself, and also not following rules.

[Boojatta]

27. Kick