I really like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest so far. The book is about Chief Bromden, a Native American in a mental hospital, and his encounters with the people there. My favorite part about the book is that it’s written in a creative way that I haven’t really encountered before. Bromden pretends to be deaf and mute, so he has little to no interactions with any of the characters (as of halfway through the book). This allows the story to be told as if it was in third person with Bromden’s views and hallucinations added on to make it more interesting.
Bromden is in a mental hospital, and not without reason. He has some sort of affliction that causes him to see and hear things, and he believes that everything is run on some sort of machinery. There are scenes in the book in which Bromden has intense hallucination/dreams, involving fog machines and being taken into the basement and watching a man get sliced open. Bromden believes that these visions are real, so sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not the things that he’s talking about are actually there.
Bromden continuously mentions the electro-shock therapy, so a lot of tension is building with that aspect of the story. McMurphy (the new inmate who causes quite the ruckus) is starting to break under the Big Nurse’s strict and somewhat sadistic rules, so I expect that he’s eventually going to get the treatment. In our group, we talked about how McMurphy is comparable to a Jesus, being the savior of the inmates. The EST table is shaped like a crucifix, so If McMurphy is EST’d and then becomes a martyr, that would be so totally Bible.
Word Count: 287
