One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

⚖The case for it

Chief Bromden narrates, and the ward arrives through a paranoid vision of a machine he calls the Combine, running the country through wire and fog. That voice is the book, not McMurphy. Around it Kesey stages a war of attrition in group therapy sessions, "clash between an unstoppable force and immovable object," with the fishing trip in the middle as the one day of joy anyone gets. The fog is the argument: patients hide inside it until McMurphy's noise clears a little of it, and "possibility enters a space like light under a door." One reader describes the effect as being "punched me in the face and said, 'Do something, you idiot!'"

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

McMurphy is in the ward on a conviction involving a fifteen-year-old girl, which the book treats as color rather than character, and readers who notice cannot unsee it: "a racist, sexist, impetuous, lecherous gambler" cast as the hero. The Black orderlies are interchangeable, referred to collectively, and Nurse Ratched is sexual repression with a clipboard, one more woman in a book whose women are nurses, prostitutes, or mothers. One of "the most racist and most sexist books I have ever read," concludes one reader. Another spent "nearly three hundred pages cursing the author and his insufferable protagonist," and Bromden's Combine passages stall the momentum for ten pages at a stretch.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings