One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest Essay

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

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.

about his dealings with Candy. In doing so, the nurse is able to get Billy to turn on the other

When the other patients sense that McMurphy is weakening, they urge him to escape. He tells them he will leave early in the morning after Billy has his date. He arranges a going away party for himself. While Billy finally enjoys the pleasure of sex with Candy, McMurphy and the

was also the one who enabled the patients to use the tub room for card games,

McMurphy was about to escape through the window when he heard the doctor scream. After Nurse Ratched make Billy feel so ashamed that he lied, he felt so guilty and ashamed that he committed suicide. Upon hearing about Billy suicide McMurphy, could no longer hold his

In Ken Kesey classic 1960’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest McMurphy and Nurse Ratched both suffer from strong and aggressive personalities. Nurse Ratched and McMurphy have manipulative and powerful individualities.

Randal McMurphy is portrayed as having many various personalities throughout Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. McMurphy stumbles into the insane asylum as a boisterous new acute. From the start, he openly asserts his strong rebellious personality. McMurphy is a Savior to the other ward patients; rather than someone who brings them down.

Randal McMurphy: A Hero in His Own Right Mental illness is something that strikes hero Randal McMurphy in the novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, but it does not affect him in any way, shape or form. McMurphy’s character, as the hero whom people in the mental institution need, is revealed through appearance, dialogue, and conflict. McMurphy’s heroism is proven through his appearance. One key point which shows this is the hat of which he is wearing once he enters the institution. Kesey describes, “There’s a paper Halloween bat hanging on a string above his head; he reaches up and flicks it so it spins around…”

Only that they claim he killed his father, which he disputes. He seems to have lead a pretty rough life and probably an abusive one at that. He acts as if he may want to start his life over and unfortunately, the grandmother and her family get in the way of that by the grandmothers recognition of his identity. The only way he can handle the situation in his view, is how he has handled everything in the past, kill the entire family. The scene where he is cleaning his glasses seems like a metaphor.

Entry thirteen: page 225-243 Summary: the Big Nurse convinces the men that McMurphy is only nice to them for his own personal gain since he keeps gambling with them and winning. None of the men really believe this, but later McMurphy uses Bromden to lift the control panel and lies to the men and bets that Bromden can when he already knew that he could. Bromden starts to get a little shady of McMurphy. The Big Nurse insists that everybody who went on the fishing trip get cleaned, and George, who is extremely germophobic, didn’t want to be cleaned with the chemicals that they had. They try to force George and he freaks out, so Bromden and McMurphy step in and fight off the men trying to get to George.

Nurse Ratched gives the impression that nurses are cruel, heartless and do not care about their patients. She makes nurse look like the 'bad guys'. People who do not care and will not listen to the patient. Nurse Ratched does not show the core nursing values that everyone should receive when being taken care of by a nurse. She looks past the problems and pretends everything is alright when it clearly is not. Nurses must notice and solve patients' problems. If they do not something dangerous could occur. For example, the most emotional scene in the movie was when the character Billy is caught with a women and had spent the night with her. Nurse Ratched theathens to call his mother and he begs her not to. He becomes hysteric and later he kills hisself because he does want the disapproval of his mother. A nurse is suppose to make sure the patient is safe and comfortable. A nurse should becareful what they say to a patient so they do not become as upset as Billy did and cause a tragedy. Nurse Ratched should have never threathened Billy. It is unprofessional and caused the patient unneccessary distress. Billy went against Nurse Ratched's authority and led him to suicide. She treats the patients as prisoners instead of patients like a professional should. She makes nurses everywhere seems horrible and unemotional. She does not care for her patients like a real nurse

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is a brilliant novel copyrighted in 1963 it is about a man testing his limits with his authority, the nurse. Ken Kesey was influenced to write this novel after being part of a experiment involving the effect LSD had on people's minds.("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Background.") This novel shows what I believe are true aspects of the way our world conceives people within a mental institution.

Randle McMurphy is moved from a prison to a mental institute and thinks that the rules will be less strict in the mental institute than it was in the prison. He finds out that it is not what he thought as the nurse of the psychiatric ward, Nurse Ratched, is very strict and keeps the patients in order by abusing them, medicating them, and electrocuting them. McMurphy does not like the way Nurse Ratched runs the psychiatric ward and all throughout the time that he is there, he rebels against her commands. McMurphy’s rebellious actions cause many conflicts in the ward and harm on the other patients and himself. One particular night, McMurphy sneaks two women into the psychiatric ward and they throw a party that goes on all throughout the night. This party causes a lot of damage not only to the building itself, but to the workers and patients at the ward. The night watchman of the ward, Mr. Turkle gets in trouble for allowing the women to come into the ward. That night, Billy sleeps with Candy, one of the women that snuck into the ward. The next day when Nurse Ratched came into work, she had seen and heard of what Billy had done and threatened to tell his mother. The workers at the ward then locked Billy into a room and while he in there, Billy killed himself. In addition to these effects of the party, McMurphy was punished by getting electrocuted to the point where he could no longer function. McMurphy’s friend, Chief, sees that he can no longer function and does not want him to suffer so he puts a pillow over his head and suffocates him to death. The movie ends with Chief escaping the psychiatric ward and finally being able to be free.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey’s 1962 masterpiece, refers to many acts of cruelty and inhumanity that take place within the asylum. The patients were treated as if they were less than human, alien creatures undeserving of the same treatment as every other person outside the mental institution. This asylum, unlike stereotypical mental hospitals, serves to create men identical to each other, whose only function is to become mindless, functioning components of a homogenized society known as the Combine. For those unable or unwilling to conform to the Combine’s standards on their own, this asylum forces their ‘proper’ dehumanization. Kesey effectively portrays man’s natural inhumanity to man through his uncomfortably common use of electroconvulsive