One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

As you read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, consider the targets of Ken Kesey's narrative: the hospital, with its emasculating nurse and sadistic orderlies, stifles individual expression (read male urges) and renders the patients both figuratively and literally impotent. The novel's "Combine," an allegorical representation of the oppressive forces of conformity in Kesey's world, and its main enforcer, Nurse Ratched, systematically prey on the men's neuroses and alienate them from their own free-spirited natures.

The book has received much criticism (and been banned in many schools) for its apparent misogyny (the female characters are either castrating nurses or prostitutes) and racism (the African American orderlies are charicatured as cartoonishly sadistic "black boys"). Do you think such criticisms are fair? What challenges does having a narrator who is a paranoid schizophrenic, often divorced from reality, present for the reader?

After the novel won wide acclaim, Kesey became a cultural icon, traveling around the country in a bus (Further) with a group called the Merry Pranksters. How did the novel help usher in the cultural changes that defined the 1960's?