Book #31

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
by Ken Kesey

"One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest."
I had to read this one for school, since I'm teaching it to my juniors, and it has been a tough read -- not only have I been tired and overworked, between school and my PSU class, but this book is incredibly moving to me, and incredibly sad. Especially now that I am mature enough and aware enough as a reader to really understand it and get the characters, and can really connect to McMurphy. Because, on some very small scale (it's only a school, after all, not a mental institution) I have to be McMurphy -- or I have to be Nurse Ratched. Some students want one thing, some want another, and the end of the book, when Bromden recognizes McMurphy's real feelings and how he is being used by the other patients on the ward, really hit home with me. It's a terrible thing, what people do to each other in order to save themselves. It's an even more terrible thing that we have built a society that puts people in so much danger of losing themselves that they need saving. I am lucky in that I have a way out, that I am not locked in a ward with these people and they are not locked in a ward with me; I can let them go their own way and find their own savior; I don't have to be their strength all by me one-sy, savvy? But reading this, after watching the movie, I have to say: the ending is SO much better in the book than in the movie. In the movie it's this one little moment, nice after this whole ordeal, but it means so much less. But in the book Bromden has struggled so much, and lost so much -- as much as any other guy on the ward, if not more -- that it brought me one of those incredible moments of peace, a feeling that as fucked up as the world is, somehow all is still right with it, when people like him can be free.

I have to be careful of my Ratched tendencies -- namely my sharp tongue. I don't think I use it to harm my students, but I can, and I often feel like I should, or at least that I can let myself. I can't let myself. And I also need to get out of the Combine one of these days. Though I don't feel too much like a finished Product, and I especially don't feel that I install components like a good little technician; the Combine owns me, but they don't control me. I don't feel that they manage to put much pressure on me, honestly; I feel like I have put quite a lot on myself in the past. But I am not a rabbit, no matter how much I try to be. I need to remember that, too. I am not a rabbit.

No offense, Lola. You're not really a rabbit, either, at least not how Harding meant it.