I had heard somewhere along the way, but forgotten, that Cuckoo is narrated by Chief Bromden, whose self-described "deaf-and-dumb act" gives him a fly-on-the-wall perspective. So while technically it's in the first-person, it has a very third-person feel to it.
What it also has, which you may have guessed because it's set in an asylum, is an unreliable narrator. I very much enjoy a good unreliable narrator, but Chief Bromden was one I found myself needing to take a break from every few chapters. Trying to untangle what's (for real) going on is a little bit like trying to read Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams. Sometimes it just hurt my brain, especially near the beginning.
But buried in the Chief's narrative was commentary about life circumstances which extended far beyond the walls of the Day Room, as I suspect is often the case with someone suffering from mental illness. One of my favorites:
"I thought for a minute there I saw [the Big Nurse] whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don’t make any difference. One by one the patients are sneaking looks at her to see how she’s taking the way McMurphy is dominating the meeting, and they see the same thing. She’s too big to be beaten. She covers one whole side of the room like a Jap statue. There’s no moving her and no help against her. She’s lost a little battle here today, but it’s a minor battle in a big war that she’s been winning and that she’ll go on winning. We mustn’t let McMurphy get our hopes up any different, lure us into making some kind of dumb play. She’ll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don’t lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that."
Who out there hasn't felt completely helpless in the face of someone or something that seemed simply unbeatable? A gem of tragic brilliance, right to the end.
