One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Dead Poet Society explore the struggle for independence through characters who are subject to an environment in which they are rewarded for their conformity. Dead Poet Society outlines the complications of young students at Welton Academy after a respected English teacher named Mr. Keating inspires them to seize the day. However, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest explore the events that transpire in a mental institute after an exceedingly ‘difficult’ patient arrives and the impact this has on Chief Bromden. Both texts critically explore the struggle for independence.
Weir and Kesey explore the struggle for independence through how the setting changes as the plots of the two texts progress. In Dead Poet Society
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Tradition, Honour, Discipline, Excellence; are the four pillars that are apparent in Dead Poets Society, Weir uses this symbol alongside the symbol of uniform to show how the students at Welton Academy are subject to conform to these rules. Similarly, in OFOTCN Kesey uses the fog that constantly surrounds Chief and the patients on the ward. Chief claims it is ‘made’ by Nurse Ratched. Because we know that Chief is schizophrenic and sees this that are not literally there, we recognize that the fog may be medically induced and is a fog of the mind rather than a literal fog. It keeps the patients from rising up in rebellion against Nurse Ratched but is also keeps them satisfied with their lives and prevent them ever thinking for themselves. The way Nurse Ratched controls the patients of her ward is very similar to the way Principle Nolan controls his students. Weir and Kesey use these characters and these symbols as tools or techniques to illustrate the difficulty around the struggle for independence. The uniform, pillars, and the fog are all symbols that help them live in that way but they prevents them from ever trying to improve their situations. As Chief says, “the men hide behind the fog because it is comfortable.” Weir and Kesey are using the symbols as a technique to explain the idea that you can live comfortably when dependent …show more content…
Consider McMurphy and Mr. Keating, both characters are very similar in a multitude of ways. Neither of them is in charge as they are both under their respective antagonist, either being Nurse Ratched or Principle Nolan. However throughout the progression of each plot, they both teach and inspire either the patients or the students to become individuals. McMurphy gave the patients the ability to seize back the power from Nurse Ratched through showing them the way how, and teaching the patients that they are their own person and have their own rights. Mr. Keating teaches the students how to be outside the box, as shown when in class he strays from the regular methods of teaching and shows the students a truly out-of-the-box concept about life, “Carpe Diem.” Towards the final moments of the plot, both characters achieve a full commitment to their cause that eventuates in self-sacrifice. McMurphy is lobotomized and Mr. Keating is fired from Welton Academy. However similarly in both plots, after both characters sacrifices themselves they pass on what they have learned and allowed others to beat their struggle for independence. Chief leaves the institution and the students stand up against Principle Nolan with what they believe in. Weir and Kesey use these characters to inspire and support those who struggle for independence and use their characterization as a technique to do so.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest explores the dysfunctions and struggles of life for the patients in a matriarch ruled mental hospital. As told by a schizophrenic Native American named Chief Bromden, the novel focuses primarily on Randle McMurphy, a boisterous new patient introduced into the ward, and his constant war with the Big Nurse Ratched, the emasculating authoritarian ruler of the ward. Constricted by the austere ward policy and the callous Big Nurse, the patients are intimidated into passivity. Feeling less like patients and more like inmates of a prison, the men surrender themselves to a life of submissiveness-- until McMurphy arrives. With his defiant, fearless and humorous presence, he instills a certain sense of rebellion within all of the other patients. Before long, McMurphy has the majority of the Acutes on the ward following him and looking to him as though he is a hero. His reputation quickly escalates into something Christ-like as he challenges the nurse repeatedly, showing the other men through his battle and his humor that one must never be afraid to go against an authority that favors conformity and efficiency over individual people and their needs. McMurphy’s ruthless behavior and seemingly unwavering will to protest ward policy and exhaust Nurse Ratched’s placidity not only serves to inspire other characters in the novel, but also brings the Kesey’s central theme into focus: the struggle of the individual against the manipulation of authoritarian conformists. The asylum itself is but a microcosm of society in 1950’s America, therefore the patients represent the individuals within a conformist nation and the Big Nurse is a symbol of the authority and the force of the Combine she represents--all...
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Vs. Dead Poets Society "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." (Robert Frost) In today's world there is no tolerance for the individual thinker. It is not acceptable to modify or bend the rules of society.
This essay will be exploring the text One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest by Ken Kesey and the film Dead poet’s society written by Tom Schulman. The essay will show how the authors use over exaggerated wildcard characters such as McMurphy and Keating. The use of different settings such as an insane asylum and an all-boys institution. And Lastly the use of fore shading to show how the authors can use different texts to present similar ideas in different ways.
The cartoon symbolism demonstrated in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest helps create dynamic features and traits in each character. Bromden indicates early that the ward is "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..."( 31). Technicians in the hospital speak with voices that "are forced and too quick on the comeback to be real talk - more like cartoon comedy speech" (33). Kesey chooses to describe some of his characters as symbolic caricatures, and others as stock figures who outgrow their black outlines (Twayne). The Big Nurse remains a cartoon villain, funny in her excessive frustration and hateful in her manipulations towards the patients.
From the moment McMurphy enters the ward it is clear to all that he is different and hard to control. He’s seen as a figure the rest of the patients can look up to and he raises their hopes in taking back power from the big nurse. The other patients identify McMurphy as a leader when he first stands up to the nurse at her group therapy, saying that she has manipulated them all to become “a bunch of chickens at a pecking party”(Kesey 55). He tells the patients that they do not have to listen to Nurse Ratched and he confronts her tactics and motives. The patients see him as a leader at this point, but McMurphy does not see the need for him to be leading alone. McMurphy is a strong willed and opinionated man, so when he arrives at the ward he fails to comprehend why the men live in fear, until Harding explains it to him by
In the novel The One Who Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Kesey explores the use of mechanical imagery to represent modern society. By means technology, society gains control and overpower individuality and natural compulsions. The hospital consists of the assistants and ‘Nurse Ratched’ who are described by ‘Chief Bromden’ as being made of motley machine parts. In ‘Chief Bromden’s’ dream, when ‘Blastic is disembowelled, rust, not blood, spills out’, reveals that the aids ...
Throughout the Cuckoo’s Nest Chief Bromden is stuck in the “fog” living in his past memories. Bromden views Nurse Ratched as the time keeper, able to speed up or slow down the clock in turn making time unbearable at times. The only escape he has is the “fog” where time does not exist (Kesey 75). These hallucinations of the fog have Bromden believe that the other patients are lost in the fog as well. These thoughts are delusional of Bromden; however, metaphorically they hold true. Nurse Ratched maintains a status quo that tends to dilute the patients senses and her routine makes the time seem to go by too fast or too slow. These situations are the reason Bromden uses the fog to escape; it provides him a haven and often times a happy place where he reminisces of the times he spent with his father. Although the fog helps Bromden escape it also sometimes brings back memories of the war and the sounds he heard when he was under attack. There’s a similarity between the enemies of war and Nurse Ratched in which he feels he can’t be harmed when he’s hiding in the fog.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey presents a situation which is a small scale and exaggerated model of modern society and its suppressive qualities. The story deals with the inmates of a psychiatric ward who are all under the control of Nurse Ratched, ‘Big Nurse’, whose name itself signifies the oppressive nature of her authority. She rules with an iron fist so that the ward can function smoothly in order to achieve the rehabilitation of patients with a variety of mental illnesses. Big Nurse is presented to the reader through the eyes of the Chief, the story’s narrator, and much of her control is represented through the Chief’s hallucinations. One of these most recurring elements is the fog, a metaphorical haze keeping the patients befuddled and controlled “The fog: then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everyone else” (Kesey 69). Another element of her control is the wires, though the Chief only brings this u...
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) The character McMurphy as played by Jack Nicholson, McMurphy’s is a criminal who is troubled and keeps being defiant. Instead of pleading guilty, McMurphy pleads insanity and then lands inside a mental hospital. Murphy reasons that being imprisoned within the hospital will be just as bad as being locked up in prison until he starts enjoying being within by messing around with other staff and patients. In the staff, McMurphy continuously irritates Nurse Ratched. You can see how it builds up to a control problem between the inmates and staff. Nurse Ratched is seen as the “institution” and it is McMurphy’s whole goal to rebel against that institution that she makes herself out to be.The other inmates view McMurphy like he is god. He gives the inmates reason to
The author of One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest, allows the reader to explore different psychoanalytic issues in literature. The ability to use works literature to learn about real world conflicts allows us to use prior knowledge to interact with these problems in reality. Ken Kesey, the author of the above novel and Carl Jung, author of “The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious” wrote how the mind can be easily overtaken by many outside factors from the past or present. The novel takes place in an asylum that is aimed to contain individuals that have a mental issue or problem. The doctors and care takers are seen as tyrants and barriers that inhibit the patients to improve their health, while the patients are limited by their initial conditions
Dead Poet’s Society, by Peter Weir, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, both contain characters who struggle for independence, but explore it with a wide variety of techniques. Dead Poet’s Society was shown in a time when young people in middle-upper class families were being pressured into doing perfectly in school and forced into futures without their input, and explores independent living in school life. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest also explores a life without independence and both texts use contrasting points of view, symbolism and narrative structure to explore ideas.
Innate nature can be defined as ‘existing at the time of birth’, thus it comes as no surprise that authors like Iain Banks and Ken Kesey explore the idea that either we, as human beings, are inclined to cruelty and violence due to this or that we’re influenced by the society that surrounds us and the actions of other individuals in said society. To some extent the theory of determinism; which suggests that all events, including human action, are all determined by causes external to the will, and as a result we cannot be morally held responsible for our actions, links in with the argument of innate nature. Both ‘The Wasp Factory’ and ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ provide prominent examples of this, for example the fact that Frank, the protagonist
The main antagonist of the novel(and film) Nurse Ratched is portrayed as the main villain throughout the entirety of both works. Her over towering presence and micromanaging abilities of the ward and the lives of those associated with it are at odds with her rather more feminine body. Kesey, through the narration provided by Bromden, offers us the audience a mental image of an unrealistically proportioned woman who was continuously angered and disappointed at the world around her, making her bitter and “depressed”. The nurse is described as a woman whose bitterness is hidden behind a mask described as one that is “smiling and calm and cold.” (Kesey p. 5). This is also where the film had its first deviation from the source material: In the film, rather than being controlled by an evil machine, Nurse Ratched is shown as the ultimate authority-wielding bureaucrat. Director Forman under...
Much like the real world, the mental institution in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is home to society of hierarchy and dictatorship. Behind the thick walls run by Nurse Ratched, it is eat or get eaten, for there are only two roles available in life; the strong and the weak. Essentially Kesey succeeds in providing an inside look of the institution itself and even deeper inside the heads of it’s victims. Kesey challenged social norms by revealing the awful truth behind government-run institutions by using metaphors, irony, symbolism and imagery that showcase the cruel and barbaric injustices performed beneath that roof.
One of the central themes in Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest, surrounds the ward institution’s hidden failure at performing its civic duty. An institution for the mentally insane is designed to help treat and cure people that are mentally wounded and are not able to function and adapt to the current society. Many patients are convicted to these institutions, but like a majority of the acutes in the novel, they are volunteering because they are aware of the fact that if they were living in the real world, they could not survive. Where the ward fails is with the strict rules and regulations that Nurse Ratched implements that have the appearance of being helpful to the patients, but are actually restricting them from fully healing.