SOURCE: Olderman, Raymond M. “The Grail Knight Arrives: Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.” In A Casebook on Ken Kesey's ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,’ edited by George J. Searles, pp. 67-79. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Olderman examines Ken Kesey's novel as a “brilliant version of our contemporary wasteland and a successful Grail Knight” who frees both the Fisher King and the human spirit in an act of affirmation and release.

Randle Patrick McMurphy sweeps into the asylum wasteland of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest like April coming to T. S. Eliot's wasteland: “mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” He literally drags the unwilling asylum wastelanders out of the tranquilized fog that protects them—a fog that is forever “snowing down cold and white all over,”¹ where they try to hide “in...