An Analysis Of Madness And Mental Illness In Literature

In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a power play is presented between an unsuspected hero and a ruthless and control obsessed nurse in a mental hospital. The tragic ending makes the reader ponder if the selfless, and sacrificial hero, McMurphy, truly wins against the evil Nurse Ratched. Although Nurse Ratched is a powerful and unyielding force against the boys, good ultimately triumphs over evil because McMurphy shows the patients their own power and how they can stand up for themselves, sacrificing himself to save the others.

In her first journal entry Kaysen tells how the decision for her to go to McLean Hospital was based on a twenty minute conversation with a psychiatrist. Kaysen had been picking at her acne and been acting out in ways which would not be considered unusual for teens today, but at the time it was a sufficient excuse for commitment to an institution. In an interview, Kaysen further develops the idea that her illness was influenced by outside factors saying, “ [Her] retrospective account of her confinement at McLean Hospital makes a cultural intervention that challenges the notion that mental illness is rooted solely in the individual.” (Kaysan, 18). Being surrounded by girls with serious illnesses forced Kaysen to assume the role of a girl with a real mental illness. Society forced her to find something wrong with herself in an attempt to fit in. Kaysen questions what mental illness truly is. She asks,“Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?” (Kaysen 41). Because Kaysen was labeled as being mentally ill although she was not, it became hard for her to tell what truly pronounced someone as mentally ill. Was everyone slightly crazy or were just some better at hiding it then others? Living in such an uptight society, people had no choice but to put on an act of perfection. When someone began to “drop the

In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the film Girl, Interrupted directed by James Mangold, the authors look at American psychiatric institutions of the 1960s and explore the idea that hospitals act as a microcosm for society, where characters are used as symbols to represent aspects of society. The settings represent conformity and rebellion, prejudice against minorities and authority figures ruling absolutely. Both authors use stylistic features to position the audience to respond to ideas common in both texts.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest demonstrated a classic power struggle between acts of extreme authority and untamed free will. Randle McMurphy represented freedom, liveliness, amusement and the power of an individual against a confining institution. However, Nurse Ratched symbolized conformity, repression, death, and enforced a strong display of authority. This film also emphasized the loss of personal freedom with recurring patterns of fences, barriers, locks and shackles. Two completely different people with different aspects on life strived to get their own methods influenced on the rest of the patients. Both leaders were using dissimilar mentalities trying to bring each other down. However, Ratched’s efforts of authoritarian rule

Although the filmic version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has more similarities than differences to the book, one key change is the point of view. The book is narrated and told from the point of view of Chief Bromden, a mental patient who pretends to be deaf and mute and experiences paranoid delusions, while the film has no specific point of view, and Bromden is merely an outside character. The reason that this change is crucial is because of Bromden’s mental condition. Because Bromden experiences hallucinations, it illustrates a different, and scarier view of the staff at the mental institution, particularly Nurse Ratched, to the audience, and as the narrator, he also gives the reader background information about himself.

One of the major themes expressed in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is gender role reversal. Stereotypically speaking males are hardened authoritarians and women are passive non-aggressors. In One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest these roles are inverted, showing the inhumane, chaotic world of a mental institution. Nurse Ratched, Mrs. Bibbit, and Vera Harding, are the three main power figures of the novel that demonstrate how this is accomplished.

Throughout Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the creation of character constructs and application of textual techniques demonstrates how the status quo is challenged. Kesey effectively reinforces this idea through the employment of a collection of stylistic techniques. Kesey implements diverse literary techniques to establish how the status quo is introduced, challenged, and how it ultimately withstands the rebellion.

Kesey uses the setting of an asylum to portray the invalid characteristics of a patient towards authority. This exemplifies the manipulative methods to take charge over people as they lack the courage to fight for agency. The use of lobotomy and electric shocks are to chasten the patients from behaving in an unacceptable way in the ward. Patients have to live with the status-quo. Knowing that man’s weapon against women is through rape, Kesey believes women have become "ball cutters" (Kesey 3). Rape is a man's means to power over women; castration is the female way to domination. Therefore, namely electric shock treatment, matriarchy and the institutional processes of psychiatry wards affect the characters of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s

Thesis: In the story, mental illness is perceived as a sickness treatable by isolation, dissuasion of mental stimulation, and restriction of physical activity.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel that encapsulates a unique view of an already unique decade. By presenting the decade through the perspective of a mentally unstable group of people, it is seen the harm done to everyone in the decade, regardless of race, class, social standing, political values, or mental

An individual can psyche himself or herself on believing that a prescribed drug given from pharmaceutical doctors are making them feel better. Madness in today’s world can be covered up by those medications, unless everyone is brainwashed in believing that it can. In present society, medicine given to people to “treat” them for certain mental illnesses is normal to see. In the nineteenth century, people who suffered from mental madness had to deal with the insanity, such as depression or hearing voices, without any help. They had to go through the pain, while everyone else watched them, and those who had no problems judged them. In the past, a person was looked down on if someone else noticed problems with that individual. This created many people to try and hide their madness, so others would think they were normal. Those who believed they were safe from this psychological illness had not received any detrimental problem in their life to unleash it. Erik Larson’s novel, The Devil in the White City, foreshadows the characteristic of madness in many of the characters. Larson reveals in his novel that it does not matter what type of individual you are because everyone has some sort of madness inside of her or him, waiting to be revealed.

Insanity is a major theme throughout the novel. Insanity is the state of being insane, and many characters became insane when they are going to the camps. Elie, his father, Ms.Schachter, and meir katz become insane.

In today’s world with the recent chaos that has erupted many people tend to think that the world has become insane and that they are the last sane individuals alive. However, in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest the ones who are seeking treatment for insanity seem more reasonable then the sane ones. This is because in the novel, the person that holds jurisdiction, Nurse Ratched also maintains a fearsome reputation. Many people would agree that the theme that drives the conflict in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a primeval form of masculinity versus asexual women, institutions and society because the author, Ken Kesey uses nonconformity, fear and alpha females as a tactic to keep the patients in the asylum.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey. The book was published in 1962, by Signet, an imprint of New American Library. The book itself has 325 pages total, and rather than being divided into chapters, it is divided into sections. As a result of this, I doubled the required number of questions needed for the study guide section of this project, and based them off of each specific section.

One Who Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, written by Ken Kesey in 1962, is one of the most psychologically complex novels, as the author’s choices of narrative and stylistic characteristics create a truly unique, fascinating, emotional and intriguing story. The novel was released in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, where the way psychology and psychiatry was viewed in America was continuously changing. Being set in a psychiatric hospital, the narrative presents a study of the institutional processes and the human mind, including a critique of behaviorism and an observance of humanistic principles. The novel explores the relationship between the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, and the patients, therefore comparing a person who constrains and someone