One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Character 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

Many situations can make a man lose his mind, or make him more insane. Between the movie Cool Hand Luke and the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, sanity is questioned. These two pieces of literature also question the jurisdiction and methods that take place in prisons and mental wards. Both stories demonstrate the idea of strength, making your own happiness, and the symbol of fear or punishment.

He says, “Just as I said: any of you sharpies here willing to take my five bucks that says that I can get the best of that woman, before the week’s up, without her getting the best of me?” (73) This quote shows that McMurphy is very self-assured that he can accomplish what he sets his mind to. The ward was not used to this kind of behavior in a man. Most of the men that were already there needed to be there because of an actual insanity problem, but McMurphy was there because he would rather have been there than where he was before and the court had allowed him to be transferred. McMurphy took them completely by surprise with his resistance to follow their instructions and to do what he was expected to do. At his arrival, he immediately exhibited disobedience. He refused to take a shower, which was the asylum’s policy for new admissions. This instantly put Randle McMurphy under the staff’s radar for them to watch out for.

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.

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.

McMurphy- Robust, strapping, humorous, and large, McMurphy is the main character of the novel. He manipulated the court system to get himself committed into the mental ward (to get out of a work sentence). His entrance into the ward sets off a whole chain of events, as he and the Big Nurse battle each other for the control of the ward. He sees the corruption and immoral acts binding the patients in the ward, and soon sets out to change them. His character is often paralleled with Jesus. Indeed, he is a martyr for trying to save his people, but there are other hints too. The Shock Shop (Electro-shock therapy) is set up so, “You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.” In the end, McMurphy receives a lobotomy, and is later killed by Chief Bromden. He is almost a tragic hero, but after his operation, many of the patients leave the ward, since they are no longer rabbits.

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.

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

Out of the four characters listed in this film, the one character that does not exhibit pretense is Billy. We first see Billy as a nervous, shy young boy with a speech impediment. Billy has weird relationships with women; he likes women and enjoys the company of them but is fearful of the women that are most close to him. Billy’s mother and especially Nurse Ratched are the women he is most afraid of. Nurse Ratched has a personal relationship with Billy’ mother, she has a special motherly power that she only has on Billy and not the other patients in the hospital. She can control him into doing stuff he doesn’t want to do because, Billy is afraid that Nurse Ratched will tell his mother about his

Throughout the novel, he is also shown to be caring for the other patients in the ward. He wishes them to stop being fearful, wanting them to take a stance for themselves and rebel against the ones oppressing them. This attitude dedicated to helping his fellow inmates is shown as early as the beginning, where McMurphy does his best to try and rile a laugh from the other patients who have had the laughs chased out of them years ago. One of the older patients, Harding, tries to explain how they are all rabbits in this world, how they must submit to the wolves for they have no power to stand up against them. However, McMurphy violently rejects this idea, telling him, “You’re no damned rabbit!” (58). McMurphy constantly tries to convince the other patients to stand up for themselves. This becomes most prominent near the end of the novel. After the suicide of a fellow inmate, McMurphy acts and attempts to strangle the nurse, knowing that by doing so will result in repercussions for him. As Bromden watches, he thinks, “We couldn’t stop him because we were the ones making him do it...it was our need that was making him push himself slowly up from sitting...it was us that had been making him go on for weeks” (274-275). Bromden realizes that the way McMurphy was acting was primarily for their sake, for the sake of all the other inmates who looked towards McMurphy as a sign of

Within the walls of the institution the novel takes place in, mental illness is a prominent theme. The fact that the narrator Chief Bromden is a diagnosed schizophrenic greatly affects the text and how people may interpret it. “Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren’t for the cartoon figures being real guys. . .” (Kesey 33). Bromden sees the world through his eyes like a cartoon and doesn’t have a clear grasp on reality due to his schizophrenia-plagued mind. Bromden views the people on the ward as

With regards to One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, R.P McMurphy is presented. When McMurphy arrives on the ward, he realizes how Nurse Ratched controlled the patients for so long to the extent that they do not make any decisions for themselves. He therefore decides rebel against Nurse Ratched and give them their manhood they lost and teach them what the outside world has to offer. He builds up the patients spirit and demostrates to them that Nurse Ratched is just like any human that are made of flesh and bones and not some sort of machine by teasing, interrupting the daily discussion and uses vulgar language to draw out her inner

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

Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is a creation of the socio-cultural context of his time. Social and cultural values, attitudes and beliefs informed his invited reading of his text.

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