Nurse Ratched Quotes

Nurse Ratched confirms to the reader that she is infect insane by reacting in the way she did when the boys were enjoying themselves, being compared to Hitler, and her being heartless towards a young man who is suicidal, proving to the readers that she

With McMurphy’s continuous outburst or rebellion, Nurse Ratched sentenced him to receive Electroshock Therapy, the second worse punishment patients would receive for misbehaviour. Determined to put on a strong exterior “he insisted it wasn’t hurting him. He wouldn’t even take his capsules. But every time that loudspeaker called him to forgo breakfast and prepare to walk to Building One, the muscles in his jaw went taunt and his whole face drained of colour, looking thin and scared-” (Kesey 241). Enduring the excruciating experience of Electroshock therapy only heightened the image the other men upheld for McMurphy and contributed to his heroism. Through the fight with the black boys and his fight to stay strong through Electroshock Therapy, McMurphy’s determination was evident to the other patients of the ward.

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

Whenever Chief Bromden is scared or is off his medication, he imagines fog rolling into the ward. When the fog drifts in, Bromden believes he can either “strain and look at things that appear in front of [him]...or [he] could relax and lose [himself]” (Kesey, 113). He embraces the fog as a way of escaping the stresses of reality. It allows him to hide and forget everything that is going on around him. It also makes him invisible to everyone else. Leaving the fog means being “out in the open where [he'd] be easy to get at” (Kesey, 112). Bromden is afraid of society as seen by his purposeful refusal to interact with the other men and his wish to be invisible. He would rather run away and hide than face a challenge. The fog is a safe place for him because it gives him the opportunity to enact what he wants during a stressful or scary situation.

The patients in the mental ward are the only ones who ever work on cleaning the hospital. The labor in addition to controlling the patients keeps the staff complacent. This complacency forces the staff to follow Rached's orders.

Nurse Ratched is a former army nurse who works in the ward, she has manipulates the men in many ways. One way is having the patients “spy on each other” making them write things down, they think she would want to hear, or know. Bromden described Nurse Ratched as having the ability to “set the wall clock to whatever speed she wants”, a metaphor for her control, showing how the patients lose track of

Chief Bromden experiences the fog in times of terror-stricken moments; where reality of strict rules and routines are upon him by Nurse Ratchet. When these moments arise he goes into the fog, stating: "You had a choice: you could either strain and look at other things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself... Being lost isn't so bad." (pg. 113-114). Chief feels safe in the fog, he lets it become a shield of blindness when he needs to escape the truth. An example of this is near the beginning of the novel; the first confrontation of the fog. Chief had to get shaved, he hides in the mop closet petrified of what they were going to do. Once they caught him in the closet and were

Nurse Ratched, the ward supervisor, personifies the forces that seek to control the individual by subduing their right to think and act for themselves. She acts as a dictator who is constantly manipulating her patients to gain an advantage over them. Because Nurse Ratched supervises a mental hospital, she is expected to tell her patients what to do, but “the novel suggests that Nurse Ratched goes beyond mere supervision and instead seeks to rule all elements of the patients lives” (“Oppression in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”). Nurse Ratched and her staff dehumanize the patients, and this eventually causes the patients to become broken inside.

There are many situations in which Nurse Ratched exhibits control over her patients, by treating them as subordinates, humiliating them and de-masculinizing them without concern for their well-being. She uses control to withhold simple privileges, such as being able to watch a baseball game on the television, tub privileges and their right to have possession of cigarettes. It seems she actually derives satisfaction from this through hints of smiles, which are so seldom seen. This only brings about anger and hostility in the patients because of the way she treats them: like children instead of men. This is put best when one patient, Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) says, “Rules? Piss on your fucking rules, Miss Ratched! ... I ain’t no little kid! When you’re gonna have cigarettes kept from me like

Regarding Miss Ratched, she seems to show signs of passive-aggressive behavior throughout the book. This behavior adds to her manipulative ways and contributed to the decrease of the patients’ progress (mental/physical state). Passive-aggressive behavior is used to maintain control and power because it’s a way for her to not display any signs of weakness. Miss Ratched, also known as the Big Nurse to the patients, fights hard to remain as the top authority figure in the Ward due to her thirst for power. To maintain the control over the men, she emasculates them, stripping them of their masculinity, in various ways to prevent the chance of an uproar against her. For instance, after a group meeting regarding Harding’s problem with his wife’s breasts, the patients attack Harding. In response, McMurphy provides an analogy of a pecking party to the current

The conflicts in Ken Kesey’s book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” seemed to surround the concept of having the power of authority in the wrong hands. In the eyes of Chief, a patient who pretended to be deaf and mute, we saw McMurphy, an insane imposture only there to relieve himself of jail time, battle against the control the head nurse, Nurse Ratchet, had over the patients in the asylum. As McMurphy’s struggles clashed between his own personal gains and facilitating those patients were too deranged to help themselves against Nurse Ratchets evil hold. Nurse Ratchet used her authority and the patient's weaknesses to dominate their mentality through intimidation. McMurphy worked to corrupt her ways and withdraw from the demeaning dominance

People at these institution have used these methods for a large amount of time. With the arrivals of both McMurphy and Irwing, the patients finally open their eyes and begin to see the atrocious treatment they receive. Despite the physical doings of electroshock therapy, lobotomies, and pills, in the ward, these treatments play a role in the patient's emotional stability. A constant exposure to the treatments causes the patients to identify themselves and each other by their mental condition. They refer to themselves as the Acutes who “ are still sick enough to be fixed” and the Chronics who “are in for the Good” (15-16). They see their mental illness as a defining characteristic. McMurphy, on the other hand, wants to get to know the patients and even asks Chief about his past. The prison uses a dehumanizing method when Aguilar becomes forced to stand saluting although the extension of this punishment does not comply with the rules. Irwing fight for his right and claims that he has experience with punishing soldiers.

Randle picks up a woman who in her first greeting asks the patients if they are all “crazy” and they respond by nodding their heads. This shows that these individuals have come to adopt being “crazy” as part of their identity, because of being institutionalized and given that label. Further suggestion of this idea is in the scene where Nurse Ratched reveals to Randle that many of the in-patients are at the psychiatric hospital on a voluntary basis, and only few of them are committed, showing their internalization of their identity as mentally ill patients. Another point that can be drawn from the film is the way, which Nurse Ratched conducts the group therapy sessions. The sessions did not appear as beneficial or therapeutic to the individuals participating in them. It is evident that Nurse Ratched, an individual in a position of power, manipulates the patients into confinement in the hospital through her group therapy sessions. She consistently revisits past traumas and difficulties for the patients, which reinforces the symptoms they believe they suffer from which causes them to feel unstable and unable to leave the hospital. Thus, through these examples in the film, it is suggested that individuals admitted to psychiatric hospitals have come to adopt their mental illness as a defining feature of their identity.

In the movie One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, we see many different examples of the sociological effect that a controlled environment can have on different individuals. The movie follows Jack Nicholson's character McMurphy. McMurphy is a convicted convict who pleaded insanity to avoid serving his sentence out in jail, hoping to ride it out in a mental hospital. The movie follows him and his struggle with the cruel hospital staff. McMurphy is upset by the treatment of the patients seeing how controlled they are, all forced to be the same. He seems to notice the damaging effects it has on everyone in there. He exploits the staff and the patients numerous times to try to give the patients a taste of freedom and show them how things should be. Basically fighting for their rights. Slowly he started to get institutionalized as well, fighting till the end, in a final attempt at giving the patient's a taste of freedom, Murphy's closest friend in the hospital commits suicide because of the threats Nurse Ratched made towards him for having sexual intercourse with a woman. Murphy lashed out in rage and tried to kill her. He was stopped and punished

Time passes and McMurphy continues to rebel. As he does so, many of the other patients follow. They break the Nurse’s Station window a couple times, start a basketball team,and even go on a fishing trip. When they return from the trip, the staff says they need to be cleaned so they are sent for “special showers.” A fight breaks out and McMurphy and Chief are sent to the Disturbed ward. Up in the Disturbed ward, McMurphy is given many “treatments” of electroshock therapy. The only way to stop the therapy is to admit that he was wrong. He refuses to admit this and continues to get the electroshock. When Chief says he should just play along, McMurphy says, “‘When I get out of here the first woman that takes on ol’ Red McMurphy the ten-thousand-watt psychopath, she’s gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars! No, I ain’t scared of their little battery-charger’” (Kesey, 250). Though he is going through torture, McMurphy continues to resist Nurse Ratched’s methods of conforming him. He is persistent in not giving in to the society. McMurphy continues to fight, even when everyone knows it’s a losing battle.