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Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is probably best known by its movie version, in which Jack Nicholson plays the rowdy, sexually bold outlaw who opposes at every chance the dispassionate, prudish, authoritarian nurse of a horrific mental ward where patients are reduced to passive, emasculated, invertebrate victims of an inhuman bureaucracy. Randle Patrick McMurphy, the ostensible hero, romps and rants through the film, making shambles of the nurse's order and gaining the audience's implicit approval. We cheer jubilantly as our lusty protagonist pokes and prods the sexless nurse, inspiring one inmate, Chief Bromden, to assert his masculine prerogative and independence by breaking out of the asylum in the final scene.
But text and film differ in the presentation of McMurphy's heroism, for the novel employs the subtlety of an untrustworthy point of view, adding a complex dimension of irony not available in the film. Kesey's novel is written from the unstable perspective of the paranoid schizophrenic Indian who is not much more than an auxiliary character in the movie. The novel's unreliable narrative voice results in tangled verbal ambiguity, but in the film, McMurphy is protagonist and hero, and the viewer's sympathy is engaged by the character's roustabout charm and apparently sacrificial motive to "cure" the other patients of their respective ailments. In the novel, Mack offers only a tenuous salvation perceived dimly through Chief's foggy paranoia and schizophrenic dementia. Ultimately, the reader ponders the reality of the entire narrative, the efficacy of McMurphy's heroism, and the validity of Chief's exuberant escape from the ward, issues not at all raised by the movie. In 1992, Kesey's novel celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, and the film is nearly two decades old, yet both have remained strong works of art and popular culture, compelling us to reexamine the unique relationship of text to film.
One key to the complex artistry of the novel is Kesey's manipulation of Chief's point of view. The author's interest in experimental narrative perspective is suggested by a letter written to Ken Babbs during the early stages of the novel's development: "I'll discuss point of view for a time now. I am beginning to agree with Stegner, that it truely [sic] is the most important problem in writing. The book...