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Discuss how ken kesey uses theme and symbolism in his novel, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest
One flew over the cuckoo's nest ken kesey analysis
One flew over the cuckoo's nest ken kesey analysis
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Weakening the Combine in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest When norms of society are unfair and seem set in stone, rebellion is bound to occur, ultimately bringing about change in the community. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest demonstrates the conflict of individuals who have to survive in an environment where they are pressured to cooperate. The hospital's atmosphere suppresses the patients' individuality through authority figures that mold the patients into their visions of perfection. The ward staff's ability to overpower the patients' free will is not questioned until a man named Randal McMurphy is committed to the mental institute. He rebels against what he perceives as a rigid, dehumanizing, and uncompassionate environment. His exposure of the flaws in the hospital's perfunctory rituals permits the other patients to form opinions and consequently their personalities surface. The patient's new behavior clashes with the medical personnel's main goal-to turn them into 'perfect' robots, creating havoc on the ward. The hospital in this novel is a scaled down version of the outside world and is equally corrupt. A system with strict policies is created forcing patients to conform to its standards, stifling individuality. The narrator is a mute patient named Chief Bromden, who refers to the hospital as the ?Combine? because it?s mechanized to create uniformity among the patients. Chief believes the Combine?s purpose is to fix the ?impurities? by transforming them into identical and perfect packages. The ones who are unable to conform to the rigid norms must remain in the Combine, patients are only allowed to return to society when they are completely ?fixed up and new? (40). Nurse Ratched, the antagonist, is in charg... ... middle of paper ... ...Murphy in such a helpless state, he takes the initiative to put him to rest. After McMurphy?s death, Chief has the power to lift the control panel and throw it through the window screen where he escapes from the Combine and into the Outside world. Even though McMurphy dies, his spirit lives within the patients and they acquire the strength to overcome the Combine and improve their circumstances. Although the novel depicts an extreme scenario of a society with rigid norms, there is some degree of a Combine in every society. The Combine is a great force that?s hard to overcome but can be broken down with determination from a strong group of opinionated individuals. It takes a leader to influence the passive to fight to obtain their rights. When enough people feel stifled by unfair treatment they need to band together as pack of wolves to try to change the system.
Ken Kesey’s, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, is a novel containing the theme of emotions being played with in order to confine and change people. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is about a mental institution where a Nurse named Miss Ratched has total control over its patients. She uses her knowledge of the patients to strike fear in their minds. Chief Bromden a chronic who suffers from schizophrenia and pretends to be deaf and mute narrates the novel. From his perspective we see the rise and fall of a newly admitted patient, RP McMurphy. McMurphy used his knowledge and courage to bring changes in the ward. During his time period in the ward he sought to end the reign of the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched, also to bring the patients back on their feet. McMurphy issue with the ward and the patients on the ward can be better understood when you look at this novel through a psychoanalytic lens. By applying Daniel Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence to McMurphy’s views, it is can be seen that his ideas can bring change in the patients and they can use their
The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey tells a story of Nurse Ratched, the head nurse of a mental institution, and the way her patients respond to her harsh treatment. The story is told from the perspective of a large, Native-American patient named Bromden; he immediately introduces Randle McMurphy, a recently admitted patient, who is disturbed by the controlling and abusive way Ratched runs her ward. Through these feelings, McMurphy makes it his goal to undermine Ratched’s authority, while convincing the other patients to do the same. McMurphy becomes a symbol of rebellion through talking behind Ratched’s back, illegally playing cards, calling for votes, and leaving the ward for a fishing trip. His shenanigans cause his identity to be completely stolen through a lobotomy that puts him in a vegetative state. Bromden sees McMurphy in this condition and decides that the patients need to remember him as a symbol of individuality, not as a husk of a man destroyed by the
... knot of tight-smiled fury" (Kesey, 23). Chief continues to describe her as a machine disguised as a doll on the outside, but steel and mechanized underneath. Her expressions are always "calculated and mechanical” (Kesey, 26), and as Chief Bromden notes later on, McMurphy is onto what he realized long ago, “that it’s not just the Big Nurse by herself, but it’s the whole nation-wide Combine that’s the really big force…and she is just a high-ranking official for them” (Kesey, 159). Bromden’s claim here is perhaps one of the most blatant parallels between the characteristics of the novel and the characteristics of real world society at the time. Perceiving that it is only he himself and McMurphy that have even the faintest impression of the concept of the Combine, Chief solidifies the idea that McMurphy is a rebel much like the beats of the 1950’s (Knapp, James. ).
McMurphy leads the patients to face their problems head on. Instead of hiding in the “thick fog”, the patients are able to expose and deal with their problems (119). The ward members start to bring up new ideas in the group meetings, defying Nurse Ratched’s overbearing ways. But despite McMurphy’s initial gusto towards defiance in the beginning of the novel, he finds that Nurse Ratched “controls” all facets of the Combine”, including the release dates of committed patients and is disheartened in his cause (156, 140). With the use of the metaphor of a combine to represent the ward, Kesey illustrates the effect it has on the patients. A combine harvests grain crops. It reaps, threshes, and winnows the crops, leaving behind the dried stems and leaves containing limited nutrients. This is the same method that Nurse Ratched uses on the
Ken Kesey's experiences in a mental institution urged him to tell the story of such a ward. We are told this story through the eyes of a huge red Indian who everyone believes to be deaf and dumb named Chief in his novel "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". Chief is a patient in an Oregon psychiatric hospital on the ward of Mrs Ratched. she is the symbol of authority throughout the text. This ward forms the backdrop for the rest of the story. The men on the ward are resigned to their regime dictated by this tyrant who is referred to as 'the Big Nurse', until McMurphy arrives to disrupt it. He makes the men realise that it is possible to think for themselves, which results in a complete destruction of the system as it was. Randle P. McMurphy, a wrongly committed mental patient with a lust for life. The qualities that garner McMurphy respect and admiration from his fellow patients are also responsible for his tragic downfall. These qualities include his temper, which leads to his being deemed "disturbed," his stubbornness, which results in his receiving numerous painful disciplinary treatments, and finally his free spirit, which leads to his death. Despite McMurphy being a noble man, in the end, these characteristics hurt him more than they help him. He forms the basis to my study of rebellion.
People often find themselves as part of a collective, following society's norms and may find oneself in places where feeling constrained by the rules and will act out to be unconstrained, as a result people are branded as nuisances or troublemakers. In the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, the author Ken Kesey conveys the attempt McMurphy makes to live unconstrained by the authority of Nurse Ratched. The story is very one sided and helps create an understanding for those troublemakers who are look down on in hopes of shifting ingrained ideals. The Significance of McMurphy's struggles lies in the importance placed on individuality and liberty. If McMurphy had not opposed fear and autocratic authority of Nurse Ratched nothing would have gotten better on the ward the men would still feel fear. and unnerved by a possibility of freedom. “...Then, just as she's rolling along at her biggest and meanest, McMurphy steps out of the latrine ... holding that towel around his hips-stops her dead! ” In the novel McMurphy shows little signs like this to combat thee Nurse. His defiance of her system included
Before R.P. McMurphy arrives, the ward is your basic average mental institution. Men line up to receive their medication, they do puzzles and play cards, and the evil head nurse and her muscle, a group of big black fellows, carry patients off to be shaved or for electroshock therapy. The people can't do anything about it, though. After all, some of them are vegetables, and according to society they're all nuts. Then one fateful day, McMurphy blows in and breathes some fresh air into the ward. He's loud, he cracks jokes, and, as he said of himself, "I'm a gambling fool and whenever I meet with a deck of cards I lays my money down." Nobody was sure whether he was crazy or he was just acting like it to get out of the work camp he transferred from. Soon enough people realized that either way, he had it out for Nurse Ratched.
The Chief has multiple delusions in which he imagines society as a dreadful machine he calls ? The Combine?. The Chief believes The Combine uses se... ... middle of paper ... ... s control through power, authority, and fear.
“Power comes from temperament but enthusiasm kills the switch”. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken kesey reveals how the struggle for power and authority is shown in the psychiatric hospital. Ken kesey expresses this mastery through Nurse Ratched and McMurphy and their effect on the patients in the ward. Nurse Ratched has all the power due to her technically being in charge of the ward. The patients “men” are powerless with their acceptance and obedience to her actions. However, everything changes when McMurphy arrives. His confidence and charisma give him some type of power that challenges and disrupts the Nurse’s drunkening thirst for power. Power in this novel is lost, gained and repossessed.
Ken Kesey has written the novel in a very intelligent and contrasting way. The hospital is presented as a metaphor for the oppressive society of the late 1950s. The novel celebrates the expression of sexuality as the ultimate goal and denounces repression as based on fear and hate. Bromden’s slightly paranoid account may be the equivalent of Keseys. The tone of the patients compared with that of the Nurse is obvious. The Nurse is confident and well educated, taking full advantage of the ward patients. The patients are uneducated and easily manipulated. They are referred to as animals by Nurse Ratched immediately taking away their dignity and self-respect and treating them in an inhuman way.
One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a movie that portrays a life story of a criminal named McMurphy who is sent to a mental institution because he believes that he himself is insane. While McMurphy is in the mental ward, he encounters other patients and changes their perception of the “real” world. Before McMurphy came to the mental ward, it was a place filled with strict rules and orders that patients had to follow; these rules were created by the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. However, once McMurphy was in the ward, everything, including the atmosphere, changed. He was the first patient to disobey Nurse Ratched. Unlike other patients who continuously obeyed Nurse Ratched, McMurphy and another patient named Charlie Cheswick decided to rebel
In Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, the author refers to the many struggles people individually face in life. Through the conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy, the novel explores the themes of individuality and rebellion against conformity. With these themes, Kesey makes various points which help us understand which situations of repression can lead an individual to insanity. These points include: the effects of sexual repression, woman as castrators, and the pressures we face from society to conform. Through these points, Kesey encourages the reader to consider that people react differently in the face of repression, and makes the reader realize the value of alternative states of perception, rather than simply writing them off as "crazy."
Unable to see McMurphy imprisoned in a body that will go on living (under Nurse Ratched’s control) even though his spirit is gone, Chief smothers him to death that night. Then he escapes the hospital and leaves for Canada and a new life. We begin to see the different situations in which the patients struggle to overcome. Whether insane or not, the hospital is undeniably in control of the fates of its
The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is based on the experience of a criminal by his own free will chooses to move to a mental institution to avoid serving his time at a prison work camp. The criminal, Randall P. McMurphy, was under the assumption that his sentence would be converted to the amount of time he would need to spend in the mental hospital. Unfortunately, what he did not realize was that once he was admitted into the institution, he would not be released until the medical staff thought he would be safe to return to society. McMurphy goes about living in the institution, and creates a bond among several of the patients. This bond creates a large impact on the structure of the mental hospital. McMurphy’s relationships with other patients in the ward develop into their own little society, where thoughts and opinions grow and interfere with the flow of the institution's rules and regulations. As a result, this causes friction between the authorities and the patients which
Ken Kesey the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo 's Nest, allows the reader to explore different psychoanalytic issues that plague the characters in his novel. Carl Jung disciple of Sigmund Fraud created “The Collective Unconscious” his theory based on how the mind can be easily overtaken by many outside factors from the past or present and even those that one is born with. The novel takes place in an asylum that is aimed to contain individuals that have mental issues from schizophrenia to repressed memories that are causing insanity. The nurses are seen as tyrants and actually worsens health of the patients turning some from acutes to chronics (incurable), while the patients are limited by their initial conditions or their developing conditions