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Institutionalized racism + essay
2 page narrative essay
2 page narrative essay
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Chief-Bromden a long-time patient at the ward narrates the story. The story starts as Chief wakes up at a normal day at the ward, feeling paranoid about everything on the ward, Nurse-Ratched and the three black boys who aid her. Chief is really tall, the black boys make fun of him and make him sweep for them and call him Chief Broom. Bromden is half indian and he pretends to be deaf and dumb, this helps him hear everything that is going on at the ward. Nurse Ratched who is also called The Big Nurse enters the ward with the gust of cold air. Bromden describes Ratched as being a mean cold-hearted woman, and she often gets really angry. She orders the aides to shave Bromden, he begins to scream and hallucinates that he is being surrounded by machine-made fog. The aides then medicate him. Bromden regains consciousness in the day room, there he speaks about a public relations man who has tours around the ward and he compliments the ward. But this time there is someone who interrupts the tour, it is Randle McMurphy, the main character. He is very confident and he has a really brassy voice. McMurphy laughs at the patients because they are stunned by his entrance, this is the first real laugh the ward has heard in years. McMurphy is a large red-headed man who has a motorcycle cap on almost everywhere and he is wearing dirty work clothes, he says that he is a gambling fool and that he was transferred from a farm. He encounters Billy Bibbit a baby-faced man with server stutter and Dale Harding, the president of the Patients´council. McMurphy checks out the day room. The patients are divided into two main categories: The Acutes and The Chronics. The acutes are the ones who can be cured and the younger and newer patients but the chronics are ...
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...lking about old memories and how he feels safe in the ward when the fog machine is turned on. At the next group meeting Bromden says the fog is so much that he cant see anything or anyone, but McMurphy has another vote and he gets all 20 acutes to raise their hand but McMurphy needs 21 hands in the air, so McMurphy goes to almost every chronic and he ends with the story teller Bromden. Bromden then finally raises his hand but the nurse says that the vote is closed. During the afternoon when they patients are supposed to be cleaning McMurphy says that it is game time. He then turns on the TV but the nurse cuts its power, McMurphy does not move from the armchair. The other acutes go sit down with him watching the blank TV screen. The nurse screams and shouts at them telling them that they are breaking the schedule. McMurphy won the bet, The Big Nurse lost her temper...
Chief Bromden’s development in the story was evident mostly by his narrations throughout the story. Kesey created Chief’s initial character to be anxious and uncomfortable. This is most evident when he speaks about a certain “fog” in his narrations. The “fog” he hallucinates about may have been included as imagery of his inner apprehension and nervousness. "It's still hard for me to have clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen"(13). Bromden had come to the conclusion that the fog was not real, but had trouble trying not to think about it. “When the fog clears to where I can see, I’m sitting in the dayroom” (9). This quote makes the reader feel that Bromden’s angst may cloud his perception and represent his desire to hide from reality. Besides the fog, Bromden als...
White characters such as Nurse Ratched and McMurphy show surprise that he is able to speak and understand them while the black boys claim that Indians can't read or write. Bromden justifies that he is victim to racial inequality when people look "at me [him] like I'm [he’s] some kind of bug" (26) or when people "see right through me [him] like I [he] wasn't there." Throughout Bromden's childhood, he realized that the white people thought he was deaf and mute and that even if he spoke, no one could hear him. In order to survive through the dangers of the social hierarchy he existed in through the ward, he feigns deafness. Bromden points out that, "it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all." (178) Bromden, has also been constantly abused by the staff and other patients at the ward who call him Chief Broom, a derogation of his name as Chief and a mockery of his floor mopping “duties” in the ward that the black boys force upon him. Bromden's circumstances is illustrative of his race and of his entire tribe. The social criticism that Kesey portrays, emerges piecemeal through Bromden’s constant flashbacks and hallucinations of his village. Kesey compares Native Indian cohesion with the new estrangement accompanying the loss of Indian cultures and the adjustment of a white lifestyle to show the social unity once created by Indian traditions. By the end of
The Big Nurse thrives from the power she holds over the men in the ward. When her power, the thing she values the most, is challenged, she cannot function properly. This not only affects her regular behavior, but the order that the ward is run with too. Chief Bromden comments that “all the machinery is quiet,” indicating the lack of force the nurse is exerting on the patients. This is to say, she isn’t able to influence the patients once her superiority is put to the test by McMurphy. Even the fog, which drugs the men into following her commands, seems to not be functioning. I predict that the Big Nurse is insecure about her practices, and pretends to be so cold and fearless, when in reality, she isn’t so fierce. The nurse can be compared to
During the first therapy meeting that McMurphy attends, Nurse Ratched begins by examining Harding's difficulties with his wife. McMurphy tells that he was arrested for statutory rape, although he thought that the girl was of legal age, and Dr. Spivey, the main doctor for the ward, questions whether McMurphy is feigning insanity to get out of doing hard labor at the work farm. After the meeting, McMurphy confronts Harding on the way that the meetings are run. He compares it to a 'pecking-party' in which each of the patients turn on each other. Harding pretends to defend Nurse Ratched, but then admits that all of the patients and even Dr. Spivey are afraid of Nurse Ratched. He tells McMurphy that the patients are rabbits who cannot adjust to their rabbithood and need Nurse Ratched to show them their place. McMurphy then bets him that he can get Nurse Ratched to crack within a week.
Bromden is nothing more than a crazy Indian who doesn't want to talk so. pretends to be deaf and dumb. Much of the understanding and respect is lost in the transition between book and movie. In the book, Bromden has flashbacks to his childhood, lighting on significant points in his childhood. His background is never even brushed upon in the movie. Of course it would have been nearly impossible to tell of Bromdens life in a movie, much less show the world from his point of view as in the book. Bromden is still a very interesting character but the real puzzle to his problems are lost in the process. & nbsp; McMurphy is a very sly, cunning man. He knows how to play his game. and does it well.
In the end, they believe they have control over the other, but they do not realize that they both have lost control until it is too late. They both pay a harsh penalty for their struggle to gain control over the ward. Nurse Ratched forever loses her precious power status and authority over the institution, while McMurphy loses the friends he tired to help, his personality, and eventually his life. Throughout the novel, these two characters relentlessly fight to control each other. They both realize that control can never be absolute.
...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.
Throughout the novel he is very loud and is known for his unwavering ability to speak his mind and confront those that oppose him. Nurse Ratched uses her voice throughout the novel to intimidate the patients. She is the antagonist of the novel. The patients obsequiously follow Ratched’s command, until McMurphy comes along. They all fear that she will send them to shock therapy if they don’t obey her.
As the narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden, a paranoid half- Native American Indian man, has managed to go unnoticed for ten years by pretending to be deaf and dumb as a patient at an Oregon mental asylum. While he towers at six feet seven inches tall, he has fear and paranoia that stem from what he refers to as The Combine: an assemblage whose goal is to force society into a conformist mold that fits civilization to its benefit. Nurse Ratched, a manipulative and impassive former army nurse, dominates the ward full of men, who are either deemed as Acute (curable), or Chronic (incurable). A new, criminally “insane” patient named Randle McMurphy, who was transferred from the Pendleton Work Farm, eventually despoils the institution’s mechanical and monotonous schedule through his gambling, womanizing, and rollicking behavior. McMurphy’s dereliction of Nurse Ratched’s rules not only provides entertainment for Bromden and the other patients, but also acts as an impetus for their own reb...
Ken Kesey and McMurphy both experience life in a mental hospital. In chapter 1, in order to escape his prison sentence, McMurphy said he was insane. (Kesey). The result of this was being enrolled in a mental hospital. Kesey, in order to get more money, signed up for an experimental drug test run by the government. He then began working with the patients at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in the psychiatric ward. “Kesey worked the night shift at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he earned extra money taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs for medical studies.” (Wieman). Ken Kesey uses his own personal experiences with working in a mental hospital to create McMurphy and recreates his story with this character. During his time working there, he has seen the things that they did to the patients that are not legal to do now, which he included in this book. He also began to have hallucinations of an Indian man sweeping the floors which he used for the idea of chief bromden.
Chief Bromden states “The air is pressed in by the walls to tight to let loose and laugh.” Before Mcmurphy arrives it is true. After his presence is recognized by the patients Mrs. Ratcheds grip over the institution starts loosing its hold. The first thing the patients do to start breaking her hold is start the gambling. They gamble for money even though it’s against ward policy. Little by little the patients show improvement with themselves it is portrayed by the ability not just to laugh but laugh at their own qualities.
Chief Bromden is a six foot seven tall Native American (half) who feels very small and weak even though by physical description, he is very big and strong. Chief does not have enough self-confidence and he is not independent. That is what makes him so small and weak. When Randle McMurphy, the new inmate in the asylum comes in, Chief is reminded of what his father used to be: strong, independent, confident and big. "He talks a little the way papa used to, voice loud and full of hell " (16) McMurphy helps Chief gains back his self-confidence and teaches him to be independent.
In the novel, Ms. Ratched just removed the tub room, which was used as a game room, from the patients, this angered McMurphy, so he decided to do something subtle to get revenge on Ms. Ratched. In the novel, it says, “The Big Nurse’s eyes swelled out as he got close . . . He stopped in front of her window and he said in his slowest, deepest drawl how he figured he could use one of the smokes he bought this mornin’, then the ran his hand through the glass . . . He got one of the cartons of cigarettes with his name on it and took out a pack . . . ‘I’m sure sorry ma’am,’ he said ‘Gawd but I am. That window glass was so spick and span I com-pletely forgot it was there’” (201). This quotation demonstrates that, even though Ms. Ratched has more power than McMurphy, she is still frightened of him, and that he might do something to either take away her power, or he might do something to hurt her physically. This also demonstrates how much power McMurphy has gained so far over Ms. Ratched. In the novel, Ms. Ratched tries to take away all of the power that McMurphy has gained over her by blaming McMurphy for making the lives of the hospital patients worse, and that McMurphy was the cause for the deaths of patients William Bibbit and Charles Cheswick. This angers McMurphy, and causes him to choke her with the intent to kill
There were no heroes on the psychiatric ward until McMurphy's arrival. McMurphy gave the patients courage to stand against a truncated concept of masculinity, such as Nurse Ratched. For example, Harding states, "No ones ever dared to come out and say it before, but there is not a man among us that does not think it. That doesn't feel just as you do about her, and the whole business feels it somewhere down deep in his sacred little soul." McMurphy did not only understand his friends/patients, but understood the enemy who portrayed evil, spite, and hatred. McMurphy is the only one who can stand against the Big Nurse's oppressive supreme power. Chief explains this by stating, "To beat her you don't have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as sson as you loose once, she's won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that." McMuprhy's struggle for hte patient's free will is a disruption to Nurse Ratched's social order. Though she holds down her guard she yet is incapable of controlling what McMurphy is incontrollable of , such as his friends well being, to the order of Nurse Ratched and the Combine.
After reading Joyce Carol Oates story, “ The Night Nurse,” revenge is what is found. This story starts off by a woman by the name of Grace Burkhardt, collapsing at a shopping mall because of a reason that was unknown at the time. She is taken in an ambulance to a hospital where she undergoes an emergency surgery for a blood clot that is in her leg that could have traveled to her heart. Grace’s stay in the hospital that night was not how she expected. The worst pain a person can indure, is the one who is left out. In the beginning of the story Grace explains herself as being laid back. “I am behaving well, look how calm and civilized” (654). Grace never screamed out at the shopping mall. She tried to act as calm as possible. Even though Grace was in so much pain, she never sobbed to God or never did she ask, “Am I dying? Will I die” (654)? Shortly after the doctors took care of Grace, she went into surgery. After this is when her attitude begins to change.