One flew over the cuckoos nest

It has been over 40 years since Ken Kesey 's One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest was published . The book was a counter-cultural classic , selling millions of copies and ushering in the era of psychedelics and hippie radicalism . Cuckoo had enormous impact on public perceptions of psychiatry and mental illness . It has been blamed and credited for the decline of electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery , it shaped the attitudes of a whole generation and it is well worth examining its appeal . The novel is set in a ward of an Oregon mental hospital

in the late 1959 recounted in flashbacks by Chief Bromden , the catatonic narrator . Bromden is a giant half-Columbian Indian , who once lost his native village to a government hydroelectric dam . He has lived in the ward for 15 years receiving over 200 shock treatments and retreating into feigned deaf and dumbness . He sweeps the ward , all the time observing , or hallucinating , the operations of a giant influencing machine , the combine . The combine controls the world , adjusting the Outside as well as the Inside . It spreads dense fog over the ward clouding the Chief 's brain , slowing time and shrinking and swelling everything with electric beams . Its agent in the ward is Nurse Ratched the Big Nurse . She sits in her office before a web of wires like a watchful robot , tending her network with mechanical insect skill .dreaming of a whole world of precision , efficiency and tidiness where the schedule is unbreakable (27 . All the machines , real...