“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey (post 2): Narrator says Big Nurse manipulates time. Does that suggest schizophrenia or multiple personality?

In post 1, I quoted Ken Kesey as saying of his narrator: “Some have described Bromden as schizophrenic. But his is a philosophical craziness, not a clinical illness.”

In the first quarter of the novel, I can see why Bromden may be read as having paranoid schizophrenia. He says Big Nurse knows things about the patients due to listening devices in the walls; she has a special control panel in the nursing station; and society is controlled by the Combine. But I will give Kesey the benefit of the doubt and attribute Bromden’s seeming paranoid delusions to the understandable thoughts of a Native American whose people had actually been persecuted.

However, in the part of the novel I have just read, Bromden says that “Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at whatever speed she wants” (1, p. 68). He says she is able to control the passage of time, which is not the kind of delusion typically seen in schizophrenia.

The kind of patient that has issues with time is one with multiple personality. As discussed in past posts, you screen patients for multiple personality by asking if they “lose time” or have memory gaps.

Why is a multiple personality issue inadvertently included in this novel? Perhaps it reflected the author’s psychology.

1. Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1962]. New York, Penguin Books, 2007.