The comments made by Henry James, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and David Daiches in their analyses of the novel as a form fit neatly into Northrop Frye's categories:  mythos (plot), ethos (character), and dianoia (theme).  James says that theme is all-important, that the novelist is above all a seeker of truth and that sincerity is the only restriction that can be placed on him in his search for truth.  The other three critics assume that truth is his goal and go on to map out restrictions, related primarily to the struggle for dominance between plot and character.

Virginia Woolf calls it "no contest."  In both her essay and in her novel, Mrs. Dalloway (which Daiches uses as an example), it is obvious that she considers the study of character the novelist's one main road to truth.  She says that the study of human character and the creation of particular characters, without important dependence on plot or setting, is the basic justification for the novel, that if we have learned something from the great novelists the lessons have come through the characters.

Forster talks about a balance between plot and character, but ends up by saying that there is no good reason for the balanced, classical plot, and he spends most of his time talking about the tyranny of plot over character--the fact that nearly all of the time in every novel, either characters are determining the plot or the plot is determining the characters, and that since the plot usually must be neatly resolved, the characters are usually being controlled by the end of the book.  Forster sides with character.

And so does Daiches.  He concludes his essay by saying that incident might be completely unnecessary, that if a novelist, using the stream of consciousness, explores a character's personality well enough at a particular point in time, he will have touched on all the potentialities that a trip along time would make actual.  The past and the future are both included in the present, so the present is all the novelist need concern himself with.

The vote, then, is three to one in favor of character, with one abstaining.  All four would probably agree that the point of all this curiosity about imaginary people is the gaining of knowledge about real people and the situations they find themselves in, but they would also agree that an emphasis on learning from a novel gets in the way of learning from a novel, so we are left with the human personality as the primary content for the novel.

By these standards Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is not nearly an ideal novel.  The plot carries too much weight during the entire novel, and it includes a final resolution.  The theme is too obvious and too didactic.

The novel, first of all, is based on a theme.  It is less about McMurphy and Big Nurse than it is about society's control of the individual and the possibility of breaking the bonds.  The agent for society is called the "Combine," an organization consisting of big business, big government, big education and all of the other institutions which are concerned not really that men be good but that they be quiet.  The Combine, of course, really does exist.  The fact that there is no conscious conspiracy does not mean that there is no conspiracy.  All that is necessary for a conspiracy to exist is that the major institutions be of the same mind and that they begin to depend on each other.  They are of the same mind, and they are far past the stage of beginning to be interdependent.

The only real differences between the "Corporate State" (Charles Reich) in our society and the Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are that the Combine is more efficient than the Corporate State and that the Combine is given fantastical technological and electronic tools to work with.  There is machinery in the walls and there are huge power plants below buildings.  Medics install electronic devices in people to keep them submissive and perform lobotomies on those who will not submit.  But except for the few added features the Combine does exist.  The Corporate State would like to be that efficient.

Up against the machine goes the individual, not especially good and not especially bad, and certainly not quiet.  His basic assumption is that if you submit you might as well be dead and that even if you know you're going to lose you have to fight.  So the confrontation is inevitable and the outcome is no less certain.  Nobody could be big enough to buck it.

That is the theme of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it is not new.  But it is perhaps the most basic, the most important issue facing our society, and filling in the details well enough can make a book important.  The plot could be one of the details, except that (as we said before) its basic outline is also predetermined.  The hero must fight but he cannot win.  There should be weaker individuals who feel the force of the machine but cannot fight alone.  The hero should win enough to give strength to the weak ones, but he must be finally broken down, to keep the novel credible.  His martyrdom should be his biggest victory over the machine.

With the theme and that much of the plot given, all that really needs to be filled in is what Northrop Frye calls "ethos"--character and setting.  And ethos is what our critics said is the basis for the novel, so maybe Ken Kesey scores pretty well after all, especially since in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest the theme and plot revolve around the characters rather than the other way around, and since the characters are the most memorable aspect of the novel.  Personal note:  when I finished the book for the first time I did not write "Down with the Combine" on the desks, but "McMurphy Lives" and "Big Nurse killed Billy Bibbit."

The conflict is a struggle between forces (individualism versus the system) but that is the war; the battle is on a gladiator-like basis, with one representative from each side pairing up for a struggle to the death.  Big Nurse Ratched is fighting for the Combine.  She is the head Nurse on one ward of a mental hospital somewhere in Oregon,  She sees society as a huge machine whose object is to run smoothly enough to keep itself running.  She views her ward as a repair shop for misfits, cogs out of round that need to be reground so they fit.  For her the word that brings down Groucho's duck is "control."  Anything out of control (anything out of place) is more than she can bear, whether what is out of control is her staff, her patients or her own unsweet disposition.  But that doesn't happen very often and when it does happen it doesn't last very long.  In the years since she took over this ward, she has gotten nearly everything "adjusted to surroundings."

She is bosomy and was pretty, but she hides it.   She has rid herself of all traits that might suggest weakness or warmth.  Her specialty is psychological castration.  She is a master of the innuendo, and can embarrass with a look or an inflection.  She has an instinctive sense for the pressure points of a wounded ego, and strikes at every opportunity.

The inmates are all huddled in a quivering bunch under her enormous, thumb when Randle Patrick McMurphy steps into the other corner to fight the opposition.  Unlike the normal inmate, unsure that he is worth anything and least certain of his virility, McMurphy is above all sure of his balls:

The shorts under his work pants are coal black satin covered with white whales with red eyes.  He grins when he sees I'm looking at the shorts.  "From a co-ed at Oregon State, chief, a Literary major."  He snaps the elastic with his thumb.  "She gave them to me because she said I was a symbol."

 . . . the kind of thing you expected from Billy Bibbit or Harding.  Harding had hands that looked like they should have done painting, though they never did; Harding trapped his hands and forced them to work sawing planks for doghouses.  McMurphy wasn't like that.  He hadn't let what he looked like run his life one way or the other, any more than he'd let the Combine mill him into fitting where they wanted him to fit.

"Now precisely what was it you saw in these--ah--dreams?"

McMurphy didn't crack a smile.  "I don't know, man.  Nothing but faces, I guess--just faces."

McMurphy inevitably loses, but he dies (the comparison is also inevitable) like Christ, to give others life.  The basic paradox gives the novel a great deal of its force--because the struggle of life against order is a human struggle.  It can be discussed in social terms (that is what The Greening of America is all about) but it takes a play-by-play account of a knock-'em-down-drag-'em-out struggle between living, breathing people to get the point across.

Which gets us back where we started:  character is the content of the novel.  "All novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite."  Or perhaps a Dale Harding, intelligent, insecure, effeminate, with graceful hands "like they carved each other out of soap."  Or a Billy Bibbit, a thirty-four year old Norman Rockwell freckle-faced kid with a stutter.  Or a Martini, who passes the basketball to players no one else can see.  Or a Chief Bromden, a six-foot-eight inch Indian mystic.  Or any of the other characters that make One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest hurt so much.