Underneath the Insanity “What goes beyond is what you see beyond what you know”, a famous quote by American author and journalist Earnest Hemingway delineates the hidden aspects of the novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. This novel takes place in the mind of a disturbed and paranoid Native American known as Chief Bromden who resides in a mental hospital along with several other characters. He is a giant man physically but a weak and coward person mentally. Bromden undergoes a path towards sanity throughout the novel. The almighty power in charge of these patients is known as Nurse Ratched who is the oppressive and strict figure who represents modern day society.
It is with this mentality that we reflect on Ken Kesey’s wonderful novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A grim satire set amongst the patients and workers in a mental institution, Kesey’s narrative recounts the story of an unpredictable con man that pursues institutionalization as a method of breaking out from the sternness of a prison work farm. Before long, in order to lessen the sexual and emotional feebleness of the men at the institution, he begins to taunt the autocratic Nurse Ratched, irrevocably changing the future of those in the ward. “As he [Jesus] landed he saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a Shepherd.”(Mark 6:34) McMurphy’s entrance onto the ward is much like that of Jesus. Much like Son of God himself, McMurphy saw the people on the psychiatric ward as metaphorical sheep, leaderless and subject to the cunning fox, in the form of Nurse Ratched.
The correctional system helps both the victim and the criminal to move forward. Jails place in Corrections Have you ever watched one of those medieval movies where the King orders a wrongdoer to be locked in the dungeon? In the dungeon they are tortured and mistreated. They are forced to live in the most inhumane conditions known to man they look sick, hungry, and very dirty. This was the prison system in the 1700’s.
He is what we call a ‘manipulator’, Miss Flinn, a man who will use everyone and everything to his own ends” (Kesey 29). Ratched implants in Flinn’s mind that McMurphy is a man that is not to be trusted, and despite his charm and good looks, he will ruin the running of the institution, which Nurse Ratched is desperate to avoid. She influences this Nurse so that she will not have any sympathy for McMurphy and that Ratched’s orders and
In the first possible way that fiction can be used to tell the truth is by understanding and reading into or about the events in a fiction story. If you know the truth behind the actual story it is very revealing to how it is in reality. For example, in the story One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is related to Ten Days in a Mad House in the revealing way of how the patients are treated by the doctors and especially the nurses in the institutions. Both of the nurses were abusive and or either threatening. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ratched was the mean and threatening nurse who would tell her insane patients that they would electroshock therapy if they didn’t obey or if they were misbehaving.
McMurphy is both a Byronic and messianic hero and reminds the patients of the ward how to stand up to the rules of society and to think for themselves. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is centered upon the role of the individual in society and the way it attempts to install order. Sometimes the means in which society imposes order compromises the individual’s freedom. The asylum houses patients who have problems functioning within the social norms of society. Randle McMurphy is a convict, accused of statutory rape charges, who feigns mental illness in order to be relieved of his work detail.
Because Nurse Ratched put fear the patients’ heart, they obey her every demand. However, when the new patient McMurphy who comes from a prison work farm to the hospital, the Big Nurse Ratched starts to lose the power she has over the patients. At the end, the conflict between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, cost McMurphy’s health, his freedom, and, finally, his life. In the novel the obvious differences between two characters mostly shown in their personality, the way threading the people and their sexual view. First of all, Nurse Ratched and McMurphy have totally different personality and different point of view.
“Yes” is the answer this machine wants. A “but” is frowned upon. A “no” is suicidal. In Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, society clearly exerts this kind of power by seemingly “choosing” the inhabitants of the mental ward. It even delegates the delightful Nurse Ratched to govern their pitiful existence.
He suffers from hallucinations and severe delusions that clog his worldview. He fears most of all a thing he refers to as “the Combine,” a corporation type thing that controls everything in society and forces people to conform to the certain society norm. He pretends to be deaf and dumb, almost to make himself appear invisible, which was difficult being that he was 6’7’’. The hospital is run by a woman by the name of Nurse Ratched, the novel’s antagonist, who Chief refers to as “the Big Nurse.” She is a former army nurse and runs her ward with an iron fist.
In the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey, a ward of a mental hospital and its inhabitants create an attractive metaphor for the controlling nature of American culture. Throughout the novel, the story of Randal McMurphy, conveyed through symbolism, a new patient in the ward as he battles against the head of the ward- Nurse Ratched. As the fight between these two powerful forces ensues, it becomes more than just a classic case of rebelling against authority. Kesey’s story invites the reader to consider just how vague, or previously vague, the line is that separates and treatment from tyrannical control. Symbolizing a valiant struggle between free will and conformity, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is a powerful, electrifying, and important piece of American literature.