SOURCE: Zubizarreta, John. “The Disparity of Point of View in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.” Literature/Film Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1994): 62-9.

In the following essay, Zubizarreta examines the treatment of Randle Patrick McMurphy's heroism in both the novel and the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, contrasting the experimental narrative perspective of the novel with the plot structure of the film.

Ken Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is probably best known by its movie version, in which Jack Nicholson plays the rowdy, sexually bold outlaw who opposes at every chance the dispassionate, prudish, authoritarian nurse of a horrific mental ward where patients are reduced to passive, emasculated, invertebrate victims of an inhuman bureaucracy. Randle Patrick McMurphy, the ostensible hero, romps and rants through the film, making shambles of the nurse's order and gaining the audience's implicit approval. We cheer jubilantly as our lusty protagonist...