One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest Insanity

Nurse Ratched wants to display the newly braindead McMurphy to show the patients on the ward what happens if they disobey her. Bromden channels his inner McMurphy by thinking back to what he would have done to prove a point. He says, “I watched and tried to figure out what he would’ve done” (Kesey). Bromden takes on McMurphy’s persona which reveals how much of an impact he had on Bromden. The reader may believe that evil has triumphed over good because McMurphy is now merely a vegetable. “Insert quote”... By referring to McMurphy as “the body,” it is dehumanized. The reader can infer that this means Nurse has taken all the life out of him. Bromden not only puts McMurphy out of his misery, but he also escapes. The escape is symbolic of leaving everything behind. Nurse Ratched’s final plot to gain control by presenting McMurphy as a vegetable is soiled and Bromden gets away before she could take control of him. The fight is over and good triumphs over

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey during a time in our society when pressures of our modern world seemed at their greatest. Many people were, at this time, deemed by society’s standards to be insane and institutionalized. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is set in a ward of a mental institution. The major conflict in the novel is that of power. Power is a recurring and overwhelming theme throughout the novel. Kesey shows the power of women who are associated with the patients, the power Nurse Ratched has, and also the power McMurphy fights to win. By default, he also shows how little power the patients have.

Everything seen as unfathomable ideals at the time are used in the book to help point out how ridiculous they are. For example one of the many crucial roles in One who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the evil Nurse Ratched who obliterates all of the standards of women during this time. She is an authoritative figure who has complete control over the male patients in the ward. She can play with them as if they are her puppets she makes even the biggest man on the Ward Chief, a 6’7 foot Indian feel tiny in comparison. In fact Chief explains to Mcmurphy “No. I’m way too little . I used to be big, but not no more.You twice my size. ” ( Kesey #219) This proves how Nurse Ratched as such control over her patients that a 6’7 man thinks he is smaller than the height of the average man like Mcmurphy. She uses any opportunity she can to get into the head of her patients by forcing the patients to repetitively speak about their flaws and insecurities and writes every bit of information down to use against them later. These tortuous meeting usually cause the patients to go into a fit the most notable patient is Billy Bibit, a man known for his stuttering problems exclaimed “ 'I c-c-couldn't take it. Wh-wh-wh-whenever the officer in charge of class would call roll, call Bibit, I couldn't answer.” then he says “You were supposed to say, “Here sir,” and I never c-c-could get it out.”(Kesey #56) This viscous routine of her silencing the patients by making them confess what they lack in order to fit into society continued until McMurphy Showed

Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest operates as an entertaining and interesting novel on a pure surface level. There’s a good story, well-developed characters and fresh language. It has all the workings of a good novel, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest isn’t just a good novel. It’s a great one, because Kesey uses Chief Bromden’s perspective to let imagery flow out of the novel and have it all come back to one theme: individuality and its repression by society. This idea is highlighted by the image of gambling vs. playing it safe, whether in literal card games or as a way of living. The mental ward’s new patient, Randle Patrick McMurphy, is a self-described “gambling fool” (12)1, while his opposer, “Big Nurse” Ratched,

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

The plot of the story is Bromden’s worldview is subjugated by his fear of what he calls the Combine, a huge conglomeration that controls society and forces people into conformity. Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb and tries to go unnoticed, even though he is six feet seven inches tall. The all-male mental patients are divided into Acutes, who can be cured, and Chronics, who couldn’t be cured. They are controlled by Nurse Ratched, a former army nurse who runs the ward with harsh, mechanical precision. Randle McMurphy arrives as a transfer from the work farm; Bromden senses that something is different about him. McMurphy swaggers into the ward and introduces himself as a gambling man. Bromden suffocates McMurphy in his bed, enabling him to die with some dignity rather than live as a symbol of Ratched’s power. Bromden, having improved his immense strength that he had thought was gone during his time in the mental ward, but escapes from the hospital by breaking through a window.

Kesey and Weir have together portrayed how the pressures of conformity instilled by authoritarian figures can cause mental unpredictability. This is shown through the theme of suicide as a major factor in both texts. The self-inflicted death of minor character Billy Bibbit in One flew Over the Cuckoos Nest was

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a play that was narrated by Chief Bromden about patient in an Oregon psychiatric hospital. It tells the story of Randle McMurphy and how he came to the psychiatric hospital, changed the dynamic of it and the power struggle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, There were two themes in the play that jumped out to me which are freedom and power. In the play, it is clear that there was a power struggle and how that caused conflict. We can see that when Nurse Ratched power get tested, it cause a major problem in the play.

While working as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward of Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, Ken Kesey was stricken with an idea that would later turn into his first novel. That novel, entitled One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, went on to become his most famous work and a celebrated piece of modern American fiction (Lupack 566). One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of a mental hospital which is running quite smoothly until a new patient enters the ward and sets chaos in motion. This new patient, McMurphy, disagrees with the rules of the ward’s authority figure, Nurse Ratched, and makes no attempt to hide it. Thus begins an all-out war between authority and the individual, leading to the suicides of several patients and even the

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, address the conflict between the individual self against authoritarian figures and societal institutions. During one of the group meetings, Chief Bromden notices that the fog is coming in thicker than ever before which blocks his sight and clouds his hearing during the meeting. Then, once all the taking fades completely, the Chief and a chair float past each other and the Chief becomes scared. In this passage, Kesey uses the motif of fragmentation, as seen in Billy Bibbit’s stutter and the alliteration of “comes cutting” when describing the Big Nurse’s voice, to explain part of the reason to the patient’s passivity; it is through a dominating force, such as the Big Nurse or Billy Bibbit’s mother,

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.

Our perspective of a stranger whom we’ve never met nor seen, but only heard of through the mouth of the enemy’s opinion, will inevitably align with the only version of the story we’ve heard. This sort of bias is found in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with Nurse Ratched’s depiction through the narration by Chief Bromden. The reliability of Bromden’s perspective is questionable, as it is his interpretation of the world, rather than what it actually is.

We feel that One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest is filled with many psychological connotations. This movie is set in a mental hospital where McMurphy was admitted to be psychologically evaluated because of violent behavior. Upon his arrival McMurphy noticed that the patients were very robot-like in their actions. The hospital is extremely structured where the patient’s daily life was monotonous. We will discuss the various connotations by answering the following questions that have been asked.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is about outsider – R P McMurphy, a sane convict sent to the institution for provocation, whose charm allow him to break through a group of patients of drugged lethargy. He is a livewire, who sees his fellow patients as colleagues and defies the Nurse Ratched and the system she represents. R P is a life force, and has will to conquer, set down in the middle of a community of crushed. Jack Nicholson justifies the character of R P McMurphy in its true verbatim, his

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey explores the tendency of humans to conform to ideals proposed by popular society. The participants in this society process their new members, shunning those who deviate from the norm. Ken Kesey uses the image of a combine harvester to symbolize the organized way society classifies its inhabitants. As a person excluded from society, Chief Bromden feels pressured by the representatives of society who try to ‘fix’ him, to make him conform to the popular ideal. Chief imagines himself lost in a fog when he feels overwhelmed by the demands of society. However, this fog starts to disappear when Randall Patrick McMurphy enters the ward. McMurphy teaches the patients