SOURCE: Boardman, Michael M. “One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Rhetoric and Vision.” Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 3 (fall 1979): 171-83.

In the following essay, Boardman characterizes One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest as a formal tragedy, focusing on the thematic significance of sacrifice as a variant of the tragic experience.

Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest illustrates well the difficulties of writing a successful tragic action in the modern world. In large part, the problem stems from what David Daiches long ago termed “the breakdown of the implicit agreement between author and readers about what was significant in human experience,” a collapse lamented by Virginia Woolf, among others. “Only believe,” she wistfully wrote, “and all the rest will come of itself.” But what if many readers find belief difficult or impossible? Any novelist who sets out to free himself from “the cramp and confinement of personality...