Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest
This is how I felt while writing this. So beware 
This is a queer book that has got me thinking and really has got my goat. This breaks all the stereotypes. The success lies in the fact that it bares all the facts of life in plain black and white. It also shows the real nature of success and taboos that the society builds around it.
It is in fact a stark book, a tragedy where the hero is killed by the narrator before the narrator runs away from the asylum. But the writing is so powerful that you keep on agreeing that that's how it should have ended.
This is a very well put allegory where the writer never ever comes out and explains his points. But it really hits the centre of the soul. It is an effort the portray the struggle between the independent spirit of a man and the decadent ever present system that are fighting. Man is just a conduit for the spirit to rage its battle. This particular man has given his spirit on to a number of other inmates and now what is left of him is just an imitation. A man is alive by what he has done and what he could do. McMurphy is killed because in his vegetable stage, he can not be used as a victory symbol by the system.
Let me start where it all begins, the story is told by a Red Indian who is son of a very powerful Indian chief. The Adobe Indians are made to lose their way of life. They live their live by spear fishing on the falls from rickety scaffoldings. But the government wants to build a dam and pays them handsomely. But the question is how much is the cost of a man, of his way of life. The chief denies all this but then he is brow bitten by the whole system in to accepting this deal. The money ensures that the Indians have stopped being the men they were. The narrator feels the person growing in size when ever he sees the spirit living with in him. This makes more sense than the actual feeling. In fact I was feeling pretty nutty myself when I was reading this :)
So all his life the narrator has been looked at as an outsider and ignored. This is when he grows depressed and acts as a dumb and deaf, starts hallucinating. The ward is full of other social rejects and most of the cases they are there not because they have some serious psychiatric problem but they are there because they were week and were defeated by the society and were forced to accept their defeat and still exist.
The society is represented by the strict nurse who lords it over every one, including the doctor. She is very good and ensuring that every one complies and she rules her kingdom ruthlessly. The problem is that her kingdom is based on fear and compliance. The depressed patients are further pushed in to more depression and need the therapy more and more. She ensures that people are more and more dependant on her rather than on each other. Even the group therapy sessions are turned in to a game of self loathing and finger pointing.
In such a situation comes in McMurphy will full of independent spirit and going forward he wins the hearts of the people by openly rebelling against the rule of the nurse. The nurse tries to get him to tow the line.
McMurphy tries different things to get the people understand the meaning of freedom and laughter and pleasure. He gets them on a fishing expedition, gets to change the television timings,gets the restrictions on cigarettes revoked. Gets in to fist fights with the ward boys, breaks the glass of the watch station and ensures that it remains broken.
But the nurse keeps coming back. He tries to get her humanness and fallibility out in the open. He is given repeated shock treatment and is made to suffer physically. But he rises to challenge again and again.
It all goes out of hand when he brings some whores to the dorm and they spend the whole night revelling. At the end, the nurse catches them and tries her old formula of attacking a man's self esteem. She manages to trouble on of the weaklings so much that he commits suicide. McMurphy assaults her and show that he can make her human by showing her fear.
From this point onward, the establishment has a winning streak. Though the spirit is kindled in the folks and a good number of them move out of the hospital, unafraid of the real world.
They perform lobotomy and McMurphy and turn him into a vegetable state. The Indian denies the system the final victory though by killing him by suffocating him with a pillow. He then runs away, wild again in the open in the element his people so revered.
He plans to visit the place where the Adobe Indians are again building the scaffolding around the wall of the dam, trying to fight the system, trying to live their live the way they want to, despite all odds. Even if it may look mindless to others, this is what they want to do, as this is their way of life!!!
Next steps. If you are not impressed enough about the book, I urge you to watch the movie (same name as the book). Though the book is more haunting, the movie with Jack Nicholson is fantastic.
If you are more interested in the actual facts: here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_(film)
