In 1975, a $4.4 million independent film set and shot in Oregon about a crude anti-hero confined in an inhumane mental hospital debuted in American theaters and became an instant critical and popular hit.
The film, adapted from the first novel by Oregon author Ken Kesey, won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay. It eventually grossed $300 million worldwide and featured legendary performances by Jack Nicholson as McMurphy, the anti-hero, warring against Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, the icy dictator who ran the ward. And watching it all is a mental patient, Big Chief, the supposed deaf and mute Native American.
Virtually every American of a certain age has seen the film and it is widely considered one of the great American movies of all time.
Remembering the movie is fine, but let's not forget its source, Kesey's novel, a book I suspect isn't being read that much anymore, and doesn't have the literary cachet of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. But One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest used to be read, especially by Oregon teenagers.
When Kesey died in 2002 at 66, 40 years after the publication of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I started reconsidering his reputation, and his special connection to Oregon. I reread all his books and suddenly noticed that one or more tattered paperbacks of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest could seemingly be found in every store in Oregon that carries used books. One day, while in a Willamette Valley thrift store, I bought two for a dollar. I found "Reedsport High School" stamped inside one copy and "#315" in the other.
These stamps indicated to me that once students from a small logging town on the Oregon Coast read the novel and a much larger high school elsewhere in Oregon once owned 315 copies of the book. At that moment, I wondered if One Flew Over of the Cuckoo's Nest was still being widely read by Oregon high school students. On a whim, a friend and I called or emailed approximately 50 high schools across the state and asked if anyone was still teaching the novel. We received 35 responses. The answer was always "No."
I was out of teaching in 2002, but in 2004 reentered the English classroom at Taft High School in Lincoln City. On my first day, when I opened a cupboard and discovered to my total astonishment about 100 copies of the novel, I decided I would teach One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the first time.
I opened the unit with a feature story and photo essay from the Oregonian documenting the current decrepit condition of the Oregon State Hospital and had the students read excerpts from an editorial series produced by the paper calling upon the Oregon Legislature to fund a new institution (they later did).
I then shared the story of how a large part of the novel was written when Kesey was a test subject for a state-sponsored LSD study. You can't ignore this fact if you plan to teach this book, just as you can't ignore the fact that so many of America's great writers — male and female — were raging alcoholics. (Why so many English teachers avoid this topic is beyond me.)
Next, I shared the story and photographs of Celillo Falls on the Columbia River, before and after the 1957 construction of a dam there that inundated Native American fishing grounds and ended a 10,000-year sacred tradition.
Why these images? Because the drowning of Celillo Falls is why Big Chief, the narrator of the novel, is in the hospital. He has been undone by what happened to his people, the ingenious manipulation by the federal government of the four affected tribes. Kesey was probably the first writer to recognize and illustrate the spiritual damage to this region wrought by building that particular dam. And in the novel, Kesey implies that what the state did to Celillo Falls, make the river cooperate, it can also do to certain people, like a McMurphy... to get him to cooperate.
All of this dam imagery, what I consider the essence of the novel (including several of the Chief's hallucinations inside the dam), is inexplicably absent from the movie. No wonder Kesey is reported to have hated and never watched it. In the movie, Big Chief tells McMurphy he's in the hospital because of alcohol.
From there we dove into the book, its curious literary devices, allegorical nature, hallucinations, meaning of the "Fog," sense of Oregon place, crassness, humor, indelible characters, flaws, metaphors, themes, and an examination of what constitutes the "Combine" in American society and how it works to thresh and harvest us for its practical use.
I can honestly say every student read the book and loved it. What each reader took away from One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest is, of course, unknown to me. But because of where my students live, where the novel is set, and where Ken Kesey lived, it was something much more intimate and immediate than, say, The Catcher in the Rye.
It is my recommendation that English teachers in Oregon resurrect and teach this novel. Combine the experience with a field trip to either the drowned Celillo Falls near The Dalles or Oregon State Hospital in Salem.
If your district can't afford a class set, contact me and I can arrange a loan of Newport High School's (where I now teach) couple hundred copies. I realize teaching a new novel requires an immense amount of preparation, so to help you out, I've included a few samples from my list of discussion statements/questions that served as our final for the unit. (No tests! Kesey would have hated that!) Each student was required to write on a minimum of three of the topics before our discussion and then required to speak at least once.
We went at it for two days and it was simply the best and most intense class discussion of my career.
1. The Combine won. McMurphy lost. No, he triumphed by liberating others.
2. I am being prepared at school to serve the Combine by one of its paid agents, Mr. Love.
3. American society must have its Nurse Ratcheds imposing order and rationality or nothing constructive would be accomplished.
4. Who am I more like? Nurse Ratched or McMurphy?
5. You've got to conform in American society or you'll never be successful.
6. The dissemination of anti-depressant drugs is a new tactic to adjust people to serve the Combine more happily and efficiently.
7. Youthful American resistance to the Combine is a joke. You think piercings, tattoos, green hair, weird clothes, skating, and illegally downloading music is rebellion?
8. The government and I have a moral obligation to tear down the dam that drowned Celillo Falls. No, it is needed for generating hydroelectric power, flood control and navigation. Besides, what's done is done.
9. Reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a complete waste of time, an act of '60s nostalgia. The time for rebellion against conformity and the Combine is long, long gone. Get over it, Mr. Love!
Last tip for teaching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: don't show the movie. A few students will seek it out for themselves and come back and report, "The book is way better."
They always are.