Who Is Weak In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The human mind is stronger than any computer or machine. However, the minds of some can become ill and weak, rendering them vulnerable to attacks. This is when the weaker minds are broken down by stronger minds who force the weak do their will. Ken Kesey suggests this war between weak and strong in his novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey describes how the weak minded can become almost like machines when broken down far enough, absorbing and executing every order from those who are stronger without question. However, Kesey also suggests what happens when a challenge to the strongest mind arises. He is adept in using metaphors, characterization, and imagery to reveal how the mental states of man can be transformed into complacent machine-like

To the nurse, that was the final act of disobedience that sentenced him to pay for the others’ freedom. They had been living as machines under the Combine’s influence for too long, and McMurphy was the one they condemned. Kesey did this to characterize the condemnation of a martyr who needed to free the others. The Combine needed another gear to fill the empty spaces left behind by the freed patients, so Kesey personified McMurphy as the gear to fit those slots. Nurse Ratched had taken McMurphy away for several weeks and when he returned, he had been stripped of his spirit and the Combine had fit him into its mechanical devices, “The black boys wheeled in this gurney with a chart…that said in heavy black letters, ‘MCMURPHY, RANDLE P. POST-OPERATIVE.’ And below this was, ‘LOBOTOMY.’…the other end at the head…a swirl of red hair over a face milk white…” (321). Here Kesey uses imagery to depict McMurphy as a hollow shell of a man who finally lost the battle against the system. Nurse Ratched had triumphed over McMurphy, but he had already freed the patients from the absolute control of the Combine. Kesey also uses McMurphy’s submission as a metaphor which states that in order to become truly free of the mechanical workings of the Combine, someone else must make the ultimate sacrifice and fully succumb to it. However, McMurphy knew he had to make this

This would result in a situation similar to the patients’ who were in the ward. These humans, who were controlled by Nurse Ratched for many years, became machines that never questioned her authority over them. Their ill minds and bodies were filled with gears and wires that oppressed their ability to look beyond life within the mental institution. When Randle McMurphy enters the ward, Nurse Ratched’s control began to waver, and the two did battle for the title of supreme mental authority. However, McMurphy’s mind was eventually stripped of its subconscious as payment for the others’ freedom. Kesey metaphorically depicts McMurphy as a flawed hero, the one who “flew over the cuckoo’s nest” in order for the other patients to tear away from the machine that held them captive. The Combine that bound them does not only exist within the mental ward, it exists everywhere. Chief recalls once in a cotton mill where he first noticed the mechanics of the system, “all the humming and clicking and rattling of people and machinery, jerking around in a pattern” (38). Even in today’s society is there a system wiring humans together in a single mechanism. This suggests that as long as modern-day society, such as the Combine, tries to control everyone like robotic slaves, there will always be someone who must suffer the consequences of freedom for everyone