One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel by the American writer Ken Kesey, published in 1962 and set in a psychiatric hospital in Oregon.

The narrator is Chief Bromden, a long-term patient who has spent years doing what he is told and letting everyone believe he cannot hear or speak. McMurphy's arrival changes the temperature of the ward: he argues, he gambles, he organises, and he treats the other men as people capable of choosing things. Nurse Ratched runs the ward with a schedule and a quiet voice, and her method is to find what each man is ashamed of and use it against him. Bromden's account of the hospital is not always literal, and the fog and the machinery he describes are his way of saying what the place does to the people inside it. The contest between McMurphy and the nurse escalates from small disobediences into something much larger, and the other men are the ones who pay for most of it.

The book is written from inside the ward, and its villains are the procedures rather than the people who carry them out.