“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey (post 6): The novel’s most important psychological and literary issue is the narrator’s multiple personality

In post 1, I quoted the author, Ken Kesey: “Without the character of that Indian, the book is a melodrama. You know, it’s a straight battle between McMurphy and Big Nurse. With that Indian’s consciousness to filter that through, that makes it exceptional.” Thus, a discussion of Bromden’s, the narrator’s, consciousness is not a detour into minutiae, but the novel’s most important psychological and literary issue.

In previous posts, I noted Bromden’s alternate personality with the small self-image, which had been unknown to all the doctors and nurses who had treated him for many years (multiple personality is usually hidden and secretive). It is accidentally discovered in conversation by McMurphy, who then uses common sense to facilitate the growth of Bromden’s small personality or, and perhaps more likely, a switch to a preexisting big personality.

At the end, Bromden’s big personality kills McMurphy (mercifully?) after the latter is lobotomized, and then escapes from the psychiatric hospital. All the reader can be sure of regarding the rest of Bromden’s life is that he has written this memoir (which is a confession to murder).

The reader has no way of knowing whether Bromden’s big personality is a good guy or a bad guy. Perhaps the small personality had replaced the big personality, because the latter had tended to do bad things.

Moreover, as I have mentioned in many past posts, persons with multiple personality almost always have more than two personalities, so the issue of what Bromden was “really” like would be more complicated.

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