Nobody up to see, just old Broom Bromden the half-breed Indian back there hiding behind his mop and can’t talk to call for help. She looks around her with a swivel of her huge head. She’s swelling up, swells till her back’s splitting out the white uniform, and she’s let her arms section out long enough to wrap around the three of them five, six times. She’s going to tear the black bastards limb from limb, she’s so furious. She knows what they been saying, and I can see she’s furious clean out of control. She goes into a crouch and advances on where they’re trapped in a huddle at the end of the corridor. They should of knew better’n to group up and mumble together when she was due on the ward. They sense she’s glaring down at them now, but it’s too late. They’re still down there together, mumbling to one another. Chief Broom describes what he sees…what we see. Kesey gives us a classic unreliable narrator…the writer keeps you guessing whether what Broom sees is real or hallucinated.Ī page later in the book, Big Nurse notices an African-American threesome who serve as her accomplices in ruling the ward. Paste reader, remember that Chief Broom is institutionalized. Color so hot or so cold if she touches you with it you can’t tell which. She slides through the door with a gust of cold and locks the door behind her and I see her fingers trail across the polished steel – tip of each finger the same color as her lips. I’m mopping near the ward door when a key hits it form the other side and I know it’s the Big Nurse by the way the lockworks cleave to the key, soft and swift and familiar she been around locks so long. Broom has been a resident of the mental health ward, pretending to be deaf and mute, since the end of World War II: We meet Nurse Ratched through the narration of a giant American Indian, Chief Broom. Kesey presents Big Nurse as a social dominatrix, a steely, remorseless controller of her environment and all trapped hopelessly in its web. Big Nurse symbolizes all big organizations and institutions that dehumanize-whether they do so to mental patients, students, employees, prisoners, soldiers, whatever. The excerpt introduces the villain of the novel, Nurse Ratched, also known as Big Nurse, as she enters a mental health facility in Oregon where Kesey sets the novel. In other words, when Kesey wrote this book…conformity ruled. Remember that Kesey writes about the 1950s, the age of the gray flannel suit and Eisenhower, of the ultimate bureaucracy-the military-industrial complex-and of the spread of cookie-cutter suburbs, those little boxes on the hillside and they all look just the same. Let me illustrate with a description from the first pages of Cuckoo’s Nest. His psychedelic, shape-shifty prose seems to blow my mind at least once on every page.
I will also disclose that if I could be gifted by the muse of writers to create stories like any other writer’s, living or dead, I would choose to write like Kesey.
ONE FLEW OVER YHE COXKOOS NEST SUMARU FULL
With full disclosure here, I proudly go on record to declare that Ken Kesey’s 1962 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stands uncontested as my favorite book of fiction. A simple nursery rhyme gives us the title of one of our greatest novels.
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