One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Kesey problematizes the medical staff's definition of sanity in several ways. First, he demonstrates that the criteria for being judged sane are based on subjective, even arbitrary, cultural standards. For instance, McMurphy attributes his diagnosis as a psychopath to excessive fighting and sex. Both behaviors are allowed and considered normal to a certain extent and in certain contexts, but McMurphy exceeds those socially acceptable boundaries. Each of the other patients is admitted for similar inability or unwillingness to conform, though specific details vary. Bromden even mentions the notion that “society decides who’s sane and who isn’t, so you got to measure up” as an explicit tenet of Spivey’s therapeutic theory (44).

Kesey inverts these standards of judging sanity by demonstrating the patients’ rationality while drawing attention to nonsensical behaviors of the staff. Early on, as he meets the inhabitants of the ward, McMurphy comments, “You boys don’t look so crazy to me” (18). As McMurphy comes to understand the hospital environment, he recognizes external forces, not physiological factors, as the patients’ most significant challenges. (Kesey presents Pete as an example of the opposite.) Ratched is shown to be no saner than the patients under her care. At the end of Part 1, when McMurphy and the others gather around the empty TV screen, Bromden speculates that “If somebody’d of come in and took a look, men watching a blank TV, a fifty-year old woman hollering and squealing at the back of their heads about discipline and order and recriminations, they’d of thought the whole bunch was crazy as loons” (126). His sense of humor exposes the ridiculousness of ward policy, which she enforces with religious zeal, as when pokes he fun at the rule specifying when toothpaste can be made available: “And, lordy, can you imagine? Teeth bein’ brushed at six-thirty, six-twenty—who can tell? maybe even six o’clock. Yeah, I can see your point” (83).

Even Bromden, whose narration is filled with fantastic imagery—supposedly evidence of his instability—consistently gains insights from his hallucinations, which suggests that he understands more, not less, through his altered perception. The question of McMurphy’s sanity reaches a climax in his concluding attack on Ratched. Apart from a single, desperate cry, Bromden reports that McMurphy gives no “sign that he might be anything other than a sane, willful, dogged man performing a hard duty that finally just had to be done, like it or not” (275). In the end, Kesey’s portrayal of the patients as engaging in a rational struggle against a morally bankrupt system not only justifies their actions but also calls into question the sanity of those who oppose them.