Mental clinic: 'This man is a Napoleon, a Ganghis Khan, Attila the Hun'

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

'This man is a Napoleon, a Ganghis Khan, Attila the Hun'

Sveta: The words above belong to a member of professional meeting held by Nurse Ratched. I suppose this is a very vivid answer to the questio

n 'What does McMurphy represent in the novel?'. Without reading the novel we can outline his character and role in the novel judging by this phrase.

While serfing the 'Net searching for the answer to the question I found pretty numerous ideas deserving special attention. First of all, some add him to social disturbers. By the way, the Big Nurse herself is in search of every possible cause to send him to the Disturbers ward. Well, fran

kly speaking, McMurphy is a disturber in a positive sence of the word. I mean he belong to that kind of people who gets sick of inactivity. That's why he bursts into long-established environment and intentionally destroys it. Of course, those who inhabit this atmosphere are woken up by his energy and they don't like it. That's why they consider him dangerous and excentric and new. It's the latter that they mostly afraid of.

Another opinion bases on the concept of Jesus (http://www.bookrags.com/essay-2005/2/18/24539/9666). Some people compare McMurphy with the Christ. As for me, such belief is rather superfluous. First of all, I have never met any prototype of Jesus Christ in American literature (unlike in Russian one. We all remeber Ieshua in Bulgakov's 'Master and Margaret'). Secondly, McMurphy is intentionally striving for better conditions on the ward. I mean his ultimate goal is not to make the Acutes and Chronics' life easier at hospital. He does everything contrary to the Nurse's orders. He contradicts her just out of the wish to contradict, the wish to change. I don't think he cares much about the patients. They are just 'flesh' which are likely to give him support. Jesus, on the contrary, didn't waste his energy on those who were in power. He knew it was useless. I doubt if he was thinking aabout it at all.

Another group of people stick to the opinion that McMurphy is an outsider. Somebody with boisterous personality, first widely accepted and then totally damaged by public unruffled equnimity. I have to disagree with them. The point is that a typical outsider does his best to move away

from all other types of people. He himself choses to be alone, abandoned, secluded or whatsoever. As you can understand, McMurphy on the contrary penetrates into the new company in order "to defeat the enemy from the inside".

From my personal point of view, McMurphy can be ranked among outstanding egotists, the prominent conquerors, scientists, kings and villains. Such people are not stopped by the number of victims of their deeds. They want to prove the whole world that one individual costs and is capable of much more than the whole world.

2 comments:

Anna V. Filatova said...: Sveta, it's a very interesting and thoughtful post. I am going to comment on it tomorrow. In your message to me, you've invited me to your draft web site, but you've forgotten to give its URL. Looking forward to visiting your web site. Hope it was fun creating it.; April 30, 2007 at 1:53 PM
Anonymous said...: Hi Sveta,
Nice to see someone else did the same topic as I did for E.I. Volkova's class. However, did you think the film was quite adequate to the original novel, or did it lose some of the novel's qualities?
(You know, Kesey himself hated the film's guts).; May 20, 2007 at 7:43 AM

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Here are some independent ruminations (Anna Vladimirovna, thanks)

Maybe it would be better if you observe not only our way of thinking but also native American perseption (http://www.halfmoonbaymemories.com/category/ken-kesey/ ) I never knew Ken Kesey personally but one of the first books my father gave me was “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” “Cukoo’s Nest” made such a deep impression on me, and when I discovered that he lived in woodsy, isolated La Honda, and I saw the cabin he lived in, I felt very close to this author I so admired. It was the 60’s–almost “romantic” now–remember Kesey’s day glo spray painted bus (now in the Smithsonian museum, driven there by Kesey himself a few years before passed) and the Merry Pranksters. The folks in La Honda did not appreciate Kesey choosing their neck of the redwoods to live and write and play in. Legend has it that on more than one occasion Kesey walked to his mailbox outside to find bullet holes in it. And of course Ken Kesey had his share of legal problems–I’ll try to get into a more detailed bio of the famous author in a future post because his past directly relates to the writing of that great book, “Cukoo’s Nest”. Ron Duarte of Duartes Tavern in Pescadero, Ron’s Aunt Carrie, now gone, once told me Ken Kesey came down from the mountains to take out books at the local library. She was the librarian, she would get to know everybody who took out books. When I was on the San Mateo County Historical Museum’s Board of Directors some years ago, I wrote Ken Kesey and asked him if he would contribute an article–or even a “fragment” to our historical publication, “La Peninsula”. I typed the letter on a typewriter, I think, and mailed it to his farm in Oregon. He had moved there from La Honda. I’m sure life there was more peaceful. Was I surprised when I received an answer from Ken Kesey. I must have been jumping up and down–he had used my typed letter to create a work of art with his magic marker pens. Here’s Kesey’s response to my request that he pen “something” for the county’s historical journal. (Imposed over my letter Kesey’s colorful magic marker words read: “La Honda is a slingshot at the sky!”) When Ken Kesey was delivering the historic day-glowed magic bus to the Smithsonian in D.C., he stopped off in San Francisco at a book fair and I almost talked to him but he was in motion, moving here, moving there, physically, a small man, but he was a muscular ball of energy. I never knew Kesey personally but I will never let go of my old copy of “Cukoo’s Nest”, both a reminder of the culture-changing 1960s and of a great book filled with truths that will remain relevant forever.

About the book

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, is the product of both the personal experiences of its author, Ken Kesey, and the specific culture in which it was written. Kesey developed the novel while he attended Stanford University as a graduate student in their Creative Writing program as the winner of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. The novel was partially inspired by Kesey's part-time job as an orderly in a Palo Alto veterans' hospital. It was also as a student at Stanford where Kesey began participating in experiments for the psychology department that involved the use of LSD. This use of LSD prompted Kesey to have hallucinations while working as an orderly. Kesey hallucinated seeing a large Indian mopping the floors of the hospital; this hallucination prompted Kesey to add the character Chief Bromden as the novel's narrator. Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to great critical and commercial success, but for one reader the factual information that he included from his experiences at the veterans' hospital proved problematic. Both Kesey and his publisher, Viking Press, were sued by a plaintiff who claimed that a minor character in the novel, a Red Cross nurse, was based on her and she was unfairly portrayed. The case resulted in revisions to subsequent editions of the book. The Red Cross nurse was changed to the nameless character Public Relation. The plaintiff in the case later became a novelist herself, and wrote a novel set in a California spa. In an ironic twist, she was the subject of a lawsuit from a doctor who claimed that a character in her novel defamed him. The novel in some sense forms a bridge between the bohemian beatnik movements of the 1950s and the 1960s counterculture movement. Kesey was significantly inspired by the beatnik culture around Stanford, and in the novel Kesey deals with a number of themes that would be significant in the counterculture movement, including notions of freedom from repressive authority and a more liberated view of sexuality. Kesey himself became a highly influential counterculture figure as part of the Merry Pranksters. Despite the counterculture themes of the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a popular and critical success. Dale Wasserman adapted the novel into a two act play in 1974, while Milos Forman directed a successful film adaptation of the novel the following year. This film, recently named as one of the twenty greatest films by the American Film Institute, featured Jack Nicholson as R.P. McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and gained awards for Nicholson and Fletcher. It remains only one of three films to sweep the top five categories at the Oscars.

Mental clinic

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

'This man is a Napoleon, a Ganghis Khan, Attila the Hun'

2 comments:

Let us introduce ourselves...

Meet Mc'Murphy

That notorious Big Nurse

The sixties

Here are some independent ruminations (Anna Vladimirovna, thanks)

About the book