One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Summary and Psychological Influence

In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a power play is presented between an unsuspected hero and a ruthless and control obsessed nurse in a mental hospital. The tragic ending makes the reader ponder if the selfless, and sacrificial hero, McMurphy, truly wins against the evil Nurse Ratched. Although Nurse Ratched is a powerful and unyielding force against the boys, good ultimately triumphs over evil because McMurphy shows the patients their own power and how they can stand up for themselves, sacrificing himself to save the others.

It is narrated by an intimidating-looking but soft-spoken Indian named Chief Bromden, who joins the ward through self-admission because he does not feel he can properly fit in and interact with society. Bromden feels ignored and neglected despite his attempts to be heard, which is why he pretends to be deaf and dumb when he enters the hospital. In reality, however, the Chief is a cunning man who is actually quite intelligent. McMurphy sees this in him and does not fall for his façade for even a second; he is determined to help Bromden open up and find his voice throughout his time in the hospital. Meanwhile, they work together to bring down the authoritative Nurse Ratched, who is in command of the ward. The Nurse, however, does not make this an easy task; she is prepared to keep up her front no matter what is thrown at her. They battle it out, each trying to reveal that the other is not truly as strong as everyone believes. However, in his last charade, McMurphy takes his plans too far. When the Nurse finds out, she is furious. She goes so far as to order a full lobotomy for McMurphy, essentially killing him. Although Nurse Ratched succeeds in taking down McMurphy, it is not a complete success for her in the end, for in the time spent with McMurphy the other men discover a true sense of self –

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.

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.

After the men’s last night together, full of fun, drinking cough syrup and partying. The next morning the Nurse and Staff came into the mess of the ward, the Nurse went to find Billy, a young patient on the ward, she found him naked in the room with a stripper. Afterwards, Nurse threaten to tell his mother so he slit his throat, the Nurse was furious about his suicide and blamed it on Mack, telling him, “First Charles Cheswick and now William Bibbit! ... Playing with human lives—gambling with human lives—as if you thought yourself to be a God!” (175) For the first time Mack had the pressure of realizing how much his leadership impacted all the men of the ward. He finally understood how far his power had gone throughout his time on the ward, he was the leader, like Christ, with his followers, or disciples. After the long party night and Mack attacking Nurse, he was sent off for treatment, when he arrived back he was a vegetable. Chief couldn’t stand the idea of Nurse using his as an example for future patients so he, “Then [he] rolled off. [He] lifted the pillow, and in the moonlight [he] saw the expression hadn’t changed from the blank, dead-end look the least bit, even under suffocation.” Scanlon asks Chief, “Is it finished?” (177) Chief realized that Mack would forever be stuck in ward unable to do anything, under the Nurse’s control,

Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, examines the vitality of struggle and sacrifice, in challenging conformity. The majority versus the individual is one of the most prominent themes throughout Kesey’s novel. The plot largely revolves around characters which are subjected to extreme oppression, yet eventually, come across their different forms of liberation. However, the reader is left contemplating whether the end justifies the means. Kesey best describes opposition to conformity through the novel's antihero, Randle McMurphy, who ultimately suffers due to his opposition. He also details the unkind consequences that result from rebellion and uses his narrative as a vessel for loosely describing the battle between those that

When McMurphy enters the ward, he assumes the role of a leader over all of his fellow patients in the ward. McMurphy has a strong, intelligent character and so he is able to manipulate others who are more vulnerable than he is. An example of his manipulation is when he shows some playing cards with pornographic photographs on them to Cheswick:

Kesey describes, “Working alongside others like her [Ratched] who I call the “combine”, which is a huge organization that aims to adjust the outside as well as the inside has made her a real veteran at adjusting things. She was already the Big Nurse in the old place when I came from the outside so long back, and she’d been dedicating herself to adjustment for God knows how long.” Ratched uses her social skills amongst the outer society from the ward to gain power within the ward. Due to her ability of networking herself in this case, a powerful social skill, she gains the “veteran” experience to then be all powerful and able to manipulate what she wants in the ward. McMurphy on the other hand socializes in a different manner as Kesey expresses, “Twenty-one! The Chief’s vote makes it twenty-one” and “…And we’re all sitting there lined up in front of the blanked out TV set, watching the gray screen, just like we could see the baseball game clear as day and she’s ranting and screaming behind us.” McMurphy is able to rally the members of the ward through persuasion of hope. His inspiration of the hope in freedom and happiness inspires Chief Bromden, a man who isolated himself and played deaf amongst the ward, to interact and at that act against the major authority. Not only does he inspire Chief Bromden but a group of patients, thus we see McMurphy is great with his social skills

1) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is an allegorical novel that takes place in a psychiatric facility (insane asylum) in the late 1950s to early 1960s. The story is told through the first person narration of Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic, half-Indian, longest-residing patient of ten years at the hospital. He suffers from delusions and hallucinations due to his schizophrenia and his electroshock therapy over the years. Bromden pretends to be deaf and dumb as to avoid other people and go unnoticed. The novel begins in the morning when a new patient arrives.

Section 1: Introduction The life events and experiences influenced the one flew over the cuckoo’s nest. So the one flew over the cuckoo’s nest is about a psyche ward ran by women called nurse Ratched. The book of one flew over the cuckoo’s nest is narrated by a character called chief Bromden who is pretending to be deaf and a mute. A man named McMurphy was currently going to jail for statutory rape and didn’t want to go so he pleaded insane.

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

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

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.

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.

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.