Mcmurphy: The Perfect Anti-Hero

During his time spent, he is at constant war with her either he losing advantage or gaining. When McMurphy first arrives to the ward, he seems different compared to other admissions. Chief Bromden the narrator of the story mentions “ I don’t hear him slide scared along the wall, and when they tell him about the shower he don’t just submit with a weak little yes, he tells them right in a loud brassy voice that he’s already damn clean, thank you.(Kesey Pg.9)”. This means compared to the other admissions McMurphy does not submit like the rest he seems strong and takes charge of the situation he is. McMurphy is a man who confident, strong, and rowdy and despite his big and muscular appearance as mentioned by the narrator, Chief Bromden observations of him. In one section of the novel, Chief Bromden mentions during the recollections of his past he mentions of his father mentioning to him about conformity based on appearance “Papa said if you don’t watch it people will force you one way or the other into doing what they think you should do”. Therefore, even though McMurphy is a tall, broad across the jaw and shoulders and chest.

Kesey has also given this novel great Symbolic value. As an opposer to the McCarthy scheme, he has used the mental hospital as a scale model of how society breaks free of society's conformity. McMurphy acts as the ‘liberator', or rebel of the ward's excessively strict conformity. He saves the patients from "the

McMurphy can also be considered a tragic hero. Although he could almost always take control of a situation and never let the combine get the best of him, he could not always control his temper. It was the one think that could get him in trouble because Nurse Ratched could not punish him with electric shock therapy unless he had an outburst. The best thing that McMurphy could have had in the hospital was patience and a calm temper because the only weapon Nurse Ratched had was to try to frustrate him. Since she has ultimate power on the ward, she could do anything she wants and make any rules. For instance, when the patients wanted to watch the world series and they clearly had a majority, she didn’t let them because she wanted them to know that she has authority

     Mcmurphy was the one who started making people laughing in the ward. When he first came into the ward he was cracking jokes and shaking everybody’s hand. (p.16)

Nurse Ratched chooses to use outside influences to help her control her patients, as is the case with Billy Bibbit, whose mother is friends with the nurse.

Interestingly, McMurphy loosely follows the path of Jesus Christ, where he begins a journey of unselfishness to help free his fellow ward members from the strong grips of the combine. With his fusion of an almost thuggish hero and a liberator, McMurphy cements himself as an archetype that was common in the psychological field from that time. In conjunction with the thoughts of many theorists, like Freud, McMurphy becomes a character that serves almost as role model for many young people. In the case of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy’s fellow ward-mates are the figurative representation of the children McMurphy would appeal to. In the end, it is McMurphy’s rebelliousness and inevitable sacrifice that help portray him as a classical hero, while also allowing him to free society from the constraints of oppression.

McMurphy got in a couple of hassles at the work farm, and the court ruled that he is a psychopath. He doesn’t want to argue with the court. Indeed, he wants to out from the farm and doesn’t care to be called a psychopath.

McMurphy learns that involuntarily committed patients cannot leave the hospital without staff approval. Therefore, he cannot leave at the end of his six months sentence, but when Nurse Ratched says he can and he begins to submit to her authority. However, by this time, he had become the leader for the other patients. Their sanity, their claim to manhood lies in the balance. Cheswick, dismayed by McMurphy’s surrender, commits suicide.

Not only does Nurse Ratched try to push McMurphy’s buttons in order to show his who’s boss, McMurphy also tries to push Nurse Ratched’s buttons in attempt to gain power over her. For instance, when McMurphy is singing in the latrine one morning, Nurse Ratched quickly arrives to put a stop to his foolish behavior, but is stopped in her tracks when she sees that he is in nothing but a towel. McMurphy tells her that someone took his clothes. Furious, she tells him that he is not able to just run around the ward in a towel. McMurphy, grinning, responds to this by saying: “‘No?’” He looks

In the beginning of the novel, McMurphy can be seen as selfish and callous because in his “Ordinary World” he: “‘...street brawls and barroom fights and a series of arrests for Drunkenness, Assault and Battery, Disturbing the Peace, repeated gambling, and one arrest-for Rape’” (Kesey 45). McMurphy was selfish but when Cheswick dies he realizes that all the men needs him to fight for them. Contrary to Nurse Ratched’s charge that McMurphy is a self-serving manipulator, my argument will prove his most important actions are altruistic. McMurphy enemy Nurse Ratched, is described by Chief as a machine.

From his first appearance in the book, it was evident that he was not like the rest. He came in laughing with joy, which was rarely heard of on the ward. Chief noted that, “Everybody on the ward, patients, staff, and all, [was] stunned dumb by him and his laughing” (Kesey 12). Laughter gave McMurphy control; he was able to use it to gradually override Nurse Ratched. Towards the end of the book, he became more resistant to the shock therapies, where he again, used his laughter to become more resistance to the treatments. He could lift up the control panel that he once could not, symbolizing the reallocation of power. Not only did McMurphy took back control Nurse Ratched had over him but he also liberated others. This was especially seen in Chief; Chief became big again and was able to laugh from joy which were both once unimaginable to him. Therefore, while he did die in the ward, McMurphy did not lose to the

When McMurphy finds out that he is one of two patients that are involuntarily committed to the hospital, it makes him realize that he alone is fighting for his freedom, and the others have been repressed by Ratched to the point of being afraid to rebel against her or simply leave. McMurphy fights until the end to free these men of their emasculation even if it

When McMurphy came to the institution, he was seen as being a problem. This is because he was going against Foucault’s argument of being docile. He did not want to conform to that. McMurphy soon realized that many of the patients were in the institution voluntarily, which caused for him to become more disobedient. He always tried to go against the nurses by telling the patients that they aren’t lunatics. He would consistently break the rules by trying to change the routine, by taking the patients fishing, teaching them to play basketball, and by sneaking in alcohol and girls during the hours of dark. Foucault would say that McMurphy was an anarchist rather than a conformist.

McMurphy is a gambling Irishman and convict, who grows tired of laboring at the Pendleton prison farm. To escape prison life, he feigns insanity and gets himself involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in Oregon. He tries to bring about a change at the hospital, for he does not like the fact that grown men act like "rabbits" and are scared of the Big Nurse. He tries as hard as he can to "get her goat", by not doing the duties he is given. He also ironically ends up serving as a

At the end of the novel, McMurphy ends up a “Vegetable” in the mental ward. Many of the voluntary patients, left. Chief, before escaping, suffocates him McMurphy. McMurphy was their hero, their rebel who was torn down by the society, after he tore it down.