Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest uses a mental hospital as a lens to critique society and illustrate how those who do not follow social norms are oppressed. The patients, through the narration of Chief Bromden, represent individuals marginalized and controlled by a powerful system called "The Combine." While the patients come to accept their circumstances, the arrival of Randle McMurphy brings laughter and rebellion against the strict Nurse Ratched. The novel examines theories of power dynamics, discipline, and the role of the individual in perpetuating the status quo through its portrayal of the dehumanizing asylum system and the patients' empowerment through humor and solidarity.

1. Carolyn Lutzenhiser
12 April 2016
SOC 380
Sociology Book Review Assignment:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey uses the lens of a mental hospital to
illustrate his thesis that current society is a cruel, oppressive force against anyone who
does not smoothly follow the status quo, but that within each individual citizen lives the
possibility for change and rebellion. Kesey presents his own unique brand of conflict theory
through the eyes of his mentally ill narrator and the other inhabitants of the hospital,
asserting that society is composed of two primary groups of individuals: those in control,
and those being controlled. While the power of those in control is presented as
omnipresent and pervasive, Kesey demonstrates that individuals hold a power as immense
and important within themselves, they just need to find out how to set it free. One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also demonstrates critical theory by showing how the patients
choose the status quo of the asylum, despite its injustice and terror, as well as Foucault and
Bentham’s theories of discipline and surveillance through Chief Broom’s visions of the
panoptic power of the Combine that controls the hospital and the greater society. Ken
Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest during a time of great societal turmoil, when
large institutions were actively perpetuating injustice that he could observe in his daily life.
His novel represents an unflinching critique of society while maintaining that through
personal empowerment, humanity can change for the better.
“’This world…belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based
on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this (p. 64).’” In
one sudden, candid burst, Dale Harding tells Randle Patrick McMurphy, the novel’s

2. messianic main character, one of the foremost arguments of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest. The novel is narrated by Chief “Broom” Bromden, a character who is meant to
epitomize those individuals who have been branded by society as “the weak.” Chief Broom
is a tall, pathologically paranoid, half Native American man. He carries with him multiple
levels of marginalization: he is not only disabled, but he is a racial minority that has been
subject to discrimination at the hands of the system for centuries. Through a series of
flashbacks it is revealed that Bromden realized that he had no voice in society as early as
his childhood on the reservation along the Columbia River and has been letting others
believe that he is deaf and mute ever since.
Chief Bromden has to be the narrator of Kesey’s story because of his multi-faceted
deaf-mute identity, as the thesis includes not only malicious and purposeful power
imbalance, but also an individual capacity for rebellion and positive revolution, something
that Chief Broom has been unaware of for decades. The theory within One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest hinges on the avowal that while within each citizen lives a capacity for
awareness and action, the unjust forces of those in power work to cloud that capacity in
every way that they can. Ken Kesey illustrates this via Chief Broom’s paranoid delusions of
an organization known only as “The Combine.” The Combine is an invincible power
structure that works to keep everyone unaware and silent through the use of technology.
Kesey’s image of the Combine is reminiscent of Marxist ideology, although instead of a
conflict between economic classes, Kesey imagines a conflict between sociopolitical and
psychosocial classes—those in power, also known as the Combine, and those being
manipulated, also known as everyone else. Bromden sees the structure of injustice in
society through his delusions. He sees wires in the wall, connecting to microphones that

3. will record everyone’s conversations. He sees machinery inside the people who oppress
him and his fellow patients, inside the orderlies and nurses. Most of all, he sees a fog
machine hidden in the ventilation, pumping out thick vapor to cloud his sight and other
senses, so that he and his peers become literally blind to their situation for periods of time.
Chief Broom’s hallucinations of the Combine parallel Bentham’s concept of the
Panopticon: a prison disciplined by the constant feeling of surveillance experienced by the
prisoners thanks to the central and panoptic location of the guard tower. Nurse Ratched is
the guard in the Panopticon of the asylum, she “[sits] in the center of this web of wires like
a watchful robot…[knows] every second which wire runs where and just what current to
send up to get the results that she wants (p. 29).” The Nurse’s station, which is exclusively
referred to as “her window,” or, “her big glass window,” is an area with a control panel and
a window large enough so that she can see the whole room where the patients spend their
days. Foucault defines the function of the Panopticon as being, “to induce in the inmate a
state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of
power,” and Nurse Ratched’s window, and her eerie ability to be everywhere at once and to
control the speaker system without being near the microphone serves exactly that function
(Foucault, p. 655). Nurse Ratched’s discipline and surveillance over the patients of the
asylum is both “visible and unverifiable (Foucault, p.655).”
As Karl Marx is the father of conflict theory, it is not surprising that Marxist parallels
arise in other parts of Ken Kesey’s novel as well. One striking scene provides a grisly
depiction of Marx’s concept of the alienation of the worker. Chief Broom has a recurring
hallucination of his dormitory room traveling downward like an elevator into the bowels of
the mental institution, where he observes what he believes is some of the behind-the-

4. scenes work of The Combine. In the most detailed scene he sees a room full of “endless
machines (p. 87)” and furnaces, “swarming with sweating, shirtless men running up and
down catwalks (p. 87).” These men are the lackeys of the Combine, working mindlessly and
tirelessly to ensure that the system functions to continue its mission of oppression and
inequality—they are alienated from their work and their product. Chief Bromden describes
them as having “dreamy doll faces,” they are stripped of their individual humanity—they
are alienated from themselves. Finally, in the most arresting snapshot of the scene, Chief
Broom witnesses one man fall down dead in the midst of the work and get immediately
scooped up and thrown into the furnace by his coworkers, his life and death nothing to
them but a split-second inconvenience—they are alienated from each other. Ken Kesey
provides a vivid image of how the social system constantly and senselessly alienates its
citizens, closing the scene by putting a sound to the process: “there’s a rhythm to it, like a
thundering pulse (p. 87).”
The nature of the setting and characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest serves to
exemplify elements of Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory, particularly the idea that
individuals serve to perpetuate the status quo by complacently remaining with wants and
needs that are merely constructs created by those in power to keep themselves in power.
This theory is present throughout the novel due to the fact that the setting is a total
institution, where the characters accept their daily routine and are thusly complicit in their
own incarceration and perpetuation of the system. In one scene, however, critical theory is
most blatantly embodied: the scene in which McMurphy is rid of the notion that his friends
were imprisoned against their will, when he is told that they are almost all in the hospital
voluntarily. In Herbert Marcuse’s book, One-Dimensional Man, he argues that inhabitants of

5. a society are often afraid of the wrong things. They project their fear onto things that are
controllable, things that the system tells them they can be protected from, when really they
should be afraid of the system itself, of its immense power to oppress and mold and
manipulate and silence. Randle P. McMurphy tries to tell this to his friends, explaining that
there is more for them to fear and want to overcome than the evil Nurse Ratched.
As McMurphy tries to explain to the group why getting rid of Nurse Ratched
wouldn’t change anything, Chief Broom narrates, “He finally gives up when he can’t explain
it (p. 192).” The process of questioning society is extremely difficult from the perspective of
the critical theorist, because it involves questioning things that seem intuitive and natural,
like basic needs and wants. None of McMurphy’s friends agree with him, they argue over
what they say is really the problem. According to Marcuse’s theory, which parallels the
story that Kesey is telling in this scene, the men of the asylum are committed to the existing
system because it meets the needs they think are paramount and it keeps them
comfortable and safe in a predictable, eternal routine. Randle P. McMurphy, acting as a
savior archetype in the novel, is the only character besides Chief Broom who sees past the
false needs and the false consciousness of the Combine, the only character who begins to
question the fundamental properties of the system. Because McMurphy can see that his
friends’ lives in the hospital are nothing more than a “comfortable, smooth, democratic
unfreedom (Marcuse, 1964),” he assumes that they all must be institutionalized against
their will, when in fact they have all chosen the system’s false consciousness, precisely
because it is comfortable and smooth. The realization of this fact is incredibly disconcerting
for McMurphy, exactly because it rings with so much truth.

6. The theories in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest underscore the gravity of the social
situation Ken Kesey observed in his society, but their pessimism was not all consuming.
Ken Kesey’s analysis of society and the power of the individual is, at its core, incredibly
hopeful, and he symbolizes this hope with the motif of laughter. When Randle P. McMurphy
comes to the mental hospital, one of the first and most disturbing things he notices is the
lack of laughter, more than that—his friends’ inability to laugh. Kesey uses laughter to
symbolize the inherent power every individual has, the deep desire for justice. Herbert
Marcuse stresses that social theory must make two imperative value judgments, the first
being that human life is worth living, the second that society should provide for peak
thriving and minimal suffering. Laughter is, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the epitome
of human life; it is the spark within each human being that leads to meaningful change, both
within the individual and within the greater society. When human beings are blind to the
fundamental nature of their society, when they live in “democratic unfreedom,” when
society eats away at them for being different, when they are alienated by the division of
labor, their spark dims so much that it might as well be doused entirely. In Kesey’s novel,
however, the laughter slowly comes back to the group of patients, representing how
individuals can always reignite the spark inside themselves.
“You know that’s the first thing that got me about this place, that there wasn’t
anybody laughing…Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing (p. 70).”
McMurphy begins his quest not to escape the asylum, not to get declared competent and
released, not even to gamble and win all the money his fellow patients have to their names,
but to bring laughter back to the ward. The quest for laughter is, of course, more than just
that—it is a quest for individual power over the powers that seek to oppress and silence

7. anyone who might be different, who might want to question the status quo, it is the quest
for humanity that has been hidden by the fog of society. Yet at the same time, it is a simple
quest: the quest to usurp the culture of despair and helplessness that Big Nurse Ratched
and the Combine have created, through humor. McMurphy leaves profane notes under the
toilet seats for the nurse to find when she checks to see if the cleaning was done properly,
he starts a sit-in when Nurse Ratched won’t let the men watch the World Series, he tells his
friends ridiculous stories from his past, and he pretends prostitutes are his relatives in
order to get the men the right to go on a field trip. When Chief Broom discovers exactly
what McMurphy is accomplishing, his breakthrough is moving and eloquent: “I’d think he
was strong enough being his own self that he would never back down the way [the
Combine hoped] he would…I’d wonder how it was possible how anyone could manage such
an enormous thing as being what he was (p. 161).” The asylum had tried time and time
again to crush the men, to manipulate them, to make them lose themselves in the fog, but
McMurphy kept driving the fog away with laughter, and the men kept finding themselves a
little bit more. McMurphy “knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you…just to
keep the world from running you plum crazy (p. 250).”
The Marxist perspective requires an inevitable revolution. Marcuse’s theory
requires constant consciousness and a willingness to give up quotidian comforts and needs
for the greater good. Bentham’s concepts emphasize how difficult it is to evade an entity
that is always watching and policing behavior to encourage conformity and discipline.
Kesey’s perspective requires a revolution of the quotidian and a willingness to act out
despite constant surveillance: laughter in the face of Nurse Ratched and the Combine. The
Combine—our society—has told us to give up our individuality, to stop laughing, to lose

8. ourselves in the fog in exchange for relative safety and comfort. The implications of Kesey’s
thesis are that we must be willing to forsake that security for something infinitely better:
the ability to be ourselves and protect and empower others so that they may do the same.
Tapping into the laughter within the individual, letting oneself “be what one is,” is a daily
task. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it is when Harding does not get embarrassed by his
effeminate mannerisms and just lets his expressive hands move about as he talks. It is
when Chief Broom remembers when he first felt silenced, and makes the decision to speak
again, because he has things to say that are worth hearing even if no one has ever told him
so. It is when Billy Bibbit sleeps with Candy the prostitute because he likes her and he
wants to, and he realizes he is worthy of making his own decisions, worthy of being
desired. In our society today, Kesey’s thesis requires the downtrodden to make a stand
every day, to speak out against oppressors, to shine in their differences rather than
conforming to the status quo, to believe in their worth independent of their productive
capacity.
When Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the United States
government was acting a lot like the Combine. It was the midst of the Civil Rights
Movement, when a huge portion of the American population was openly oppressed
through the law, and was protesting to end the injustice. Black citizens across the nation
were standing up for themselves as individuals worthy of just treatment and the right to be
themselves, and they were being denied those rights and put down for their protests daily.
Kesey’s images of the patients in the asylum, their marginalization, their oppression, and
their eventual empowerment echoes the fight for justice happening in the real world at the
time that the novel was written. Also going on at that time, the Central Intelligence Agency

9. was testing drugs on citizens with the goal of using them to torture and interrogate
individuals suspected of crimes. Kesey himself voluntarily participated in the project,
known as Project MKUltra. Just as the patients were complicit in their subjugation, Ken
Kesey chose to take part in the efforts of the government to manipulate its citizens.
While Ken Kesey’s account of patients in a mental hospital fighting for themselves
and discovering the value of their humanity in the face of institutional and societal injustice
is a poignant and compelling story, it oversimplifies and sugarcoats the situation of its own
characters quite a bit. It is a gruesome novel that often spares no one’s feelings in its
descriptions of violence and sadness, but Kesey does not appropriately acknowledge the
severity of mental illness. His image of an ideal society, which is really only present as a
negation of all that is the asylum, would not solve the very real psychological problems that
his characters have. It is true that society penalizes and marginalizes those who do not
conform to the dominant ideologies and values. It is true that laughing in the face of that,
and fighting for human individuality is a noble and important cause. What is very untrue is
the idea that Chief Broom, or Dale Harding, or Billy Bibbit, or even Randle McMurphy
would be able to adequately take care of themselves in the real world without some sort of
help. Ken Kesey has painted an idyllic picture, where Chief literally runs off into the sunset
to return to his Columbia River, but his character of Bromden wouldn’t last a week on the
Columbia without a psychotic break of some sort. Just as Marx underestimated the positive
potential of social support systems and overestimated the happiness of the Cave Man,
Kesey denies the reality that individuals do exist who need institutional support in order to
be themselves without harming themselves or others.

10. The pathology of Kesey’s characters does not invalidate his thesis necessarily,
though. Just because Ken Kesey’s men in the asylum would not be able to realize their full
potential in society without some sort of institutional or medical support does not mean
that the potential is not there. The fact that Chief Broom finds it within himself to throw the
control panel through the window, like McMurphy told him he could, and escape the
hospital, says that he realized that laughing and being himself was worth something bigger
than the things the Combine told him and made him do. Billy Bibbit and Cheswick kill
themselves when they feel betrayed by McMurphy, but Harding stays around and takes
McMurphy’s place as the rabble-rouser. McMurphy gets lobotomized, but Chief Bromden
realizes his individual power and his ability to do what’s right, and he kills McMurphy so
that McMurphy does not have to exist as a shell of himself. The laughter that McMurphy
worked so hard to bring onto the ward stays even after his death, and it inspires others to
work for change and to be themselves.
Marcuse argues that society has made individuals into one-dimensional characters,
devoid of development and living in stagnancy. Kesey argues that people are never one-
dimensional, but sometimes just need to be reminded of their complexity and potential.
This much seems true, and it gives a lot of hope to every human being and society: hope for
a better future, hope for happier people, hope for a revolution. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest does alarmingly censor the grim reality of pathology in society, and it is important to
remember that society needs systems in place to deal with pathology, because just learning
to laugh is not enough to solve the darkest problems within human beings. But in the end,
the novel provides a beautiful call to action and an unabashed analysis of any existing order
that holds people back from who they might be. Thanks to Kesey’s novel, a social theory

11. that unites the social and the individual presents itself, providing a vision of social and
individual change that is both radical and accessible.
Works Cited
African American Civil Rights Movement (1954-68). (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2016 from the
African American Civil Rights Movement (1954-68) article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1954–
68)
Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish. In Scott Appelrouth & Laura Desfor Edles
(Ed.)*, Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings (pp. 651-
664). Los Angeles, CA: Pine Forge Press.
Kesey, Ken (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin Group.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Novel). (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2016 from the One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Novel) Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(novel)
Project MKUltra. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2016 from the Project MKUltra Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra