One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Analysis

Every work of literature – whether long, short, humorous, or frightening – enables all readers to experience a certain set of emotions from the passages within the text; but what do these emotions imply? In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster clarifies that these reactions closely associate with symbolic meanings. He specifies how “every reader’s experience of a work is unique” in order to explain that almost everything stands as a symbol and carries various ideas – depending on the reader’s emotional interpretation (Foster 110). Foster also mentions the concept of intertextuality in which pure originality is impossible, thus resulting with authors influencing one another. Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stands

Hospitals are meant to help some people heal physically and others mentally. In the novel One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey published in 1962, readers are introduced to a mental hospital that has goals that do not align with helping people. Within the hospital, characters with varied personalities and opinions are intermixed with three main characters playing specific roles with supporting characters close by. With the characters’ motivations, themes develop such as the emasculation of the men in the hospital by an oppressive nurse. Symbols, such as laughter and the “combine”, are also pertinent to themes as the readers watch the men transitioning from being oppressed to being able to stand up for themselves causing change in hospital policy.

The men stand up against Nurse Ratched for the first time when they join McMurphy by sitting in front of the blank television screen even when told they cannot watch the baseball game. For the first time, the men are independent, “watching the gray screen just like [they] could see the baseball game clear as day” while Nurse Ratched “rant[s] and scream[s]” behind them (Kesey). Imagery and descriptive words reveal Nurse Ratched’s anger, describing her voice as “an electric saw ripping through pine” (Kesey). The boys still join McMurphy despite the enormous fit the Nurse is throwing which reveals the trust and inspiration McMurphy has given to them already. Because of McMurphy, Chief Bromden transforms from a shy, lurking shadow into someone that feels the need to take action. In the beginning of the novel Billy Bibbit states that Bromden is “scared of his own sh-sh-shadow” and that he is “just a bi-big deaf Indian” (Kesey). However, Bromden is faking being unable to hear and actually narrates the entire novel from his point of view. McMurphy realizes that he can hear and builds up his confidence which will eventually inspire Chief Bromden to put McMurphy out of his misery and escape the ward himself. The trust Bromden puts into McMurphy builds their relationship which proves to be pertinent in the end. Billy Bibbit’s confidence is also

The 1960’s was a period of great dissatisfaction from people who felt their rights were being violated. Millions of Americans, young and old, black and white, came together to fight against racial discrimination and protest the Vietnam War. The government suppressed the southern black population the right to vote, while sponsoring a war in Vietnam that was widely unpopular. Reflecting the anti-establishment movements of the 1960’s, Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It has since become an American classic for its themes of rebellion and nonconformity against an over controlling authority that does not respect individualism and humanity.

In Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the nurse Miss Ratched is a fine example of a realistic fictional villain. Possession of three key components is essential in identifying what makes Miss Ratched a villian. Motive is what drives the villain to commit the very acts that allow them to be considered evil in the first place, and often drive their entire being as a character. While they must possess motive, they must also have a sense of morals that coincides with their motives (typically evil, or distorted) and follow their moral compass in a way that often causes trouble for those around them. Additionally, a villain is frequently associated with their opposite; the hero who combats them. Kesey’s character perfectly aligns with these three categories of what makes a villain, and it is unquestionable that she is the villain of the novel.

In the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, the lead protagonist, Randle McMurphy, changes over the course of the novel because of the characters that he meets and the effects they have on him. Originally, McMurphy was selfish, disrespectful, and inconsiderate, but then he forms closer bonds with the other characters and they change him and the way he views other people. The characters in the mental hospital struggle with conforming to the dictator in the ward, Nurse Ratched. McMurphy comes into the hospital as a way out of a prison sentence and tries to teach the patients that they need to stand up for themselves and do what they believe is right.

In this book written by Ken Kesey, the main character is a man named R.P. McMurphy who tricks people into thinking that he is a psychopath. To McMurphy, the asylum is a get out of jail free card, which quickly turns out to be something else entirely. However, one vital aspect of this book is the way in which it addresses and provides insight upon several contemporary issues relating to the American healthcare system, by illustrating the ways in which our modern healthcare system has improved and grown in the last five decades. This includes the following areas of healthcare: the need for a healthcare reform, the lack of healthy doctor-patient relationships, and the murky definition of mental illness.

1. Passage: “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.” (Page 69)

He is the son of Tee Ah Millatoona, also known as The Pine That Stands Tallest on the Mountain, who is a Native American chief who was strong and powerful and his mother is a Caucasian woman named Mary Louise Bromden. She was the dominant force in the couple. Chief’s father explains to him, “You’re the biggest by God fool if you think that a good Christian woman takes a name like Tee Ah Millatoona. You were born into a name, so okay, I’m born into a name. Bromden. Mary Louise Bromden. And when we move into town,... that name makes gettin’ that Social Security card a lot easier” (Kesey, 239). He took her last name because it was easier to be accepted by society with a “white” last name. This acceptance shows that his mother had a dominance over his father and therefore emasculates him. When McMurphy and Chief are talking, Chief brings up how his mother grew twice the size of his father and how his father wouldn’t give in to what anyone said and did what he pleased until the Combine started working on him. “It wanted us to live in inspected houses. It wanted to take the falls. It was even in the tribe, and they worked on him. In the town they beat him up in the alleys and cut his hair short once…. He fought it a long time until my mother made him too little to fight any more and he gave up” (Kesey, 187). His mother influenced him into signing papers that agreed to giving up

“A success, they say, but I say he’s just another robot for the Combine and might be better off as a failure…”(17).

Who do you know that has a brave soul to go into a mental ward because they don’t want to work on a work farm anymore? Well, that is our main character in the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey. The book is about a person and main character, McMurphy, coming into the mental ward because he is “crazy” when really he just doesn’t want to keep working on the work farm he was at. He tries to rebel over the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, by doing countless amounts of things to get her mad. Both Nurse Ratched and McMurphy represent power in similar and different ways. They both use the patients for manipulation. However, their differences in manipulation are different in their own ways. Nurse Ratched uses her calm smile while McMurphy uses her persuasive side. They both do use the patients for manipulation, but they use different patients. Nurse Ratched uses Billy, Harding, and the attendants. McMurphy uses the guard, Chief, and Candy. Overall, both Nurse Ratched and McMurphy use their power in a different way.

Imagine a world with no sex. Where those who openly embrace their sexualty are diagnosed as “deranged”. It’s an ideology that would produce a bleak world where everyone is repressed in one way shape or form. We witness this oppressive agenda practiced all throughout Ken Kesey's The Bird That Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest as Nurse Ratched strips the wards of their libido in twisted assertion of dominance. This due to the fact that Kesey conveys the idea that sexuality can be used as a weapon of mass destruction through the use of Nurse Ratched’s characterization, the conflict that emerges between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, and using McMurphy to act as Nurse Ratchets foil. All of these elements depicts how important sexaulity is to all the characters.

Conformity has been the target of many works of literature even before Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye spewed angst about everyone around him being a “phony.” To many people, there are forces in the social order that shape others to fit a certain mold, and one who does not fit the mold will be considered an outcast by society. During the 1960’s, rebellion was a shared act among the majority, including authors and artists; this was due to the conflict in the East as well as the Civil Rights movement. To these people, the government was a criminal, even a machine perhaps, which threatened one’s individuality. This provides some historical context on the background of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey, the author, worked in

The author of the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Keasey, received his inspiration for the book while volunteering at a veteran's hospital. This is where he was first introduced to LSD. The moment he tried it, he became addicted, and began experimenting on himself with the drugs, observing the effects. The novel deals with the tyrannical rule of head Nurse Ratched in a mental hospital somewhere in Oregon. She runs all business and daily life in the asylum to her every whim and rules the ward by fear and manipulation. This has gone on for as long as the narrator, Chief Bromden, can remember. However a new patient, Randle McMurphy, enters the hospital and begins to wreak havoc upon the system

Characters like Billy Bibbit, who is too timid, with a speech impediment and Harding who is a closet homosexual and was less avert in sexuality were seen as having mental problems, and were committed to the asylum. McMurphy demonstrated the treating of these patients like normal people, helped them to become more in line with society then Nurse Ratched’s rules and group therapy meetings, or pecking party as Chief Bromden would call it. Chief Bromden was a Native American and wasn’t insane until he was institutionalized and withdrew himself from everyone else pretending he was deaf and dumb to protect himself. Ken Kesey’s message here with Chief Bromdens silence, was to portray the natives of the time having no voice in the country and to show the controlling and manipulative manner of Nurse Ratched that emasculated and de-socialised these grown men.