One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

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One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

The author of the novel stages this story in a mental institution located in the Northwest Pacific. The manuscript was written in the early on 1960s when the issues involving social norms were being put on the spotlight. In “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey examines how the appearance of a controversial mental patient affects everybody around him in the asylum. This character that Ken Kesey creates, Mr. McMurphy, introduces many themes like: man vs. man, man vs. machine, treatment of the clinically insane, and insane vs. sane. The narrator of this novel is Chief Bromden ‘Chief Broom,' who is an inmate, thought to be both deaf and dumb. His pretense is mainly aimed at keeping off attention. He is the longest serving patient in the hospital since the Second World War. Through this narrator, the author focuses on Randle Patrick McMurphy who is also an inmate. The latter is convicted of battery and gambling. He fakes insanity in order to serve his sentence in a mental organization as a replacement for of a prison. He does this to escape the work at the prison and he is convinced that, in the mental institution, he would have comfort. Consequently, he is confined in an Oregon Psychiatric Hospital. (Kesey, p. 9)

Accordingly, McMurphy has been described to be antagonizing Nurse Ratched and her practices, which leads to a struggle of power between the inmate and the nurse. It has been vividly described that, the connection between the disability and gender in the novel is represented by the idea that men of the ward are unable to assert their respective masculinity and that this is ultimately the key cause of the fact that they are institutionalized,

Looking further into the individual...

... middle of paper ...

...in the institution against the team members’ especially the head nurse, Ratched, leading to a wave of rivalry among the inmates and the nurse. Even though she ends McMurphy’s reign, Nurse Ratched is ultimately defeated by him through the new state of mind of all patients still living in the ward. McMurphy was so powerful in the ward that the only way to defeat him was to alter his brain. This tragic operation caused Chief Bromden to kill his best friend because of his inability to see McMurphy live under his new state. This effectively displays McMurphy’s influence over everyone in the asylum.

Work cited

Adelman, Irving, and Rita, Dworkin. The Contemporary Novel: A Checklist of Critical Literature on the English Language Novel Since 1945. Lanham, Md. [u

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