Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Acknowledging the Insane within a Literary Classic “One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”(Kesey 310) is an old children’s rhyme which is used as an epigraph for the book’s title. This theme continues throughout the novel; the patients on the ward are the birds flying in the opposite direction of Nurse Ratched and McMurphy ends up being the “one [who flies] over the cuckoo’s nest”. The book is thoroughly narrated by the main character, Chief Bromden, who is the son of the chief of a Columbian Indian tribe. The reasons behind the story being told in Chief Bromden’s point of view is because this character portrays himself in the story to be deaf and dumb and has the advantage …show more content…
The patients are portrayed to be intellectual and normal, yet are often overseen; society in the novel labels them as one categorized people, but their dignity and self-knowledge is foreseen, in fact, the patients on the ward happen to explain towards the end of the novel that they are settled in this caging institution voluntarily. “[H]ow society is what decides who’s sane and who isn’t” (Kesey 49) is thought aloud by the narrator, Chief Bromden; Kesey utilizes the epitome of this rhetorical device by showing how the insane think beyond being “insane” and have the characteristic of ironically being human. Intelligent. In “America Needs Its Nerds”, by Leonid Fridman, the moral of the article is to give off motivational encouragement and pride to geeks and nerds of America. “…[R]efusal to conform to society..” is easily connected to the same situation in Kesey’s novel. This targets a certain group in society and triggers them to take a step forward and act with it. Although we are put into categories and criticized for it, we must take effort in abstaining from society’s harsh perspectives and devote to sticking up for one’s self defiance. The novel also intelligently puts the quote “…but the men were immune to her poison”(Kesey 313) to embed the idea that these insane asylum …show more content…
The fog that Chief Bromden brings up on several occasions is a representation of a type of mental medicine since Bromden is schizophrenic and often pictures things that are not really there. Instead of the medicine being physically there, it is mentally blurred. This fog is the medicine to keep the patients from rebelling or disobeying Nurse Ratched. It’s also an emblem to not further the state of which they currently are in. In other words, it is a way of preventing the patients to think of a life better than theirs and wanting to improve it. Chief Bromden says that the fog is used to hide in being of its more comfortable state. To continue with symbolism, the Combine is the machine that controls the asylum. Chief Bromden uses this to put somewhat of an image that the Combine is not one thing, just the asylum, but is also combined together with society’s government and the entire world for that matter. This represents authority and is connecting back to the idea that individuals or groups of people can sometimes be controlled because of certain rules and “wiring” in the system we must live in. There are many more examples of symbolism, for not all of them are as significantly important as that previously stated and
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
It first started out as a hallucination for Bromden to show how he portrays his current situations in a different perspective .In the beginning of the novel, Kesey indicates that “it’s not so thick but what [he] can see if [he] strain real hard” (Kesey 42). The denotation of “strain” points out to the word “force” and in this case Kesey portrays how Bromden is the way he is being quiet because of how the Americans treated him and his father. The word “thick” refers to a bulky or heavy object, in this case the bulky object refers to the Combine. The Combine is an imagination figure of a hospital filled with people like Bromden and he thinks that people like him need to go into the Combine in order to come out fixed. Kesey makes it so Bromden can only “see” and hear, which lets Bromden to hallucinate because through his eyes he sees the fog; the fog shows how he has seen people get lobotomized and it ruins his thinking. While Bromden sees the condition Pete is in he thinks “one good thing--being simple like that put him out of the clutch of the Combine” (Kesey 50). Instead of “one thing” Kesey added in “good” which makes it look like Bromden himself is in a better state than Pete and that it could be worse if Bromden did talk, then Nurse R...
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...
I chose the subject about “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” written by Ken Kesey in 1962 for my research paper because my mother told me years ago of the accompanying film and how interesting it is. Two years ago a friend of mine came back from his exchange programme in the United States of America. He told me that he and his theatre group there had performed this novel. He was and still is very enthusiastic about the theme and about the way it is written. Although I started reading the novel, I didn’t manage to finish it till the day we had to choose our subjects at school. When I saw this subject on the list, which we were given by our English teacher Mr Schäfer, I was interested immediately. So I chose it.
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.
In Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the reader has the experience to understand what it was like to live in an insane asylum during the 1960’s. Kesey shows the reader the world within the asylum of Portland Oregon and all the relationships and social standings that happen within it. The three major characters’ groups, Nurse Ratched, the Black Boys, and McMurphy show how their level of power effects how they are treated in the asylum. Nurse Ratched is the head of the ward and controls everything that goes on in it, as she has the highest authority in the ward and sabotages the patients with her daily rules and rituals. These rituals include her servants, the Black Boys, doing anything she tells them to do with the patients.
Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest takes place in a mental hospital. The main character, or protagonist is Randle P. McMurphy, a convicted criminal and gambler who feigns insanity to get out of a prisoners work ranch. The antagonist is Nurse Ratched also referred to as The Big Nurse . She is in charge of running the mental ward. The novel is narrated by a patient of the hospital, an American Indian named Chief Bromden. Chief Bromden has been a patient at the hospital longer than any of the others, and is a paranoid-schizophrenic, who is posing as a deaf mute. The Chief often drifts in and out between reality and his psychosis. The conflict in the novel is between McMurphy and The Big Nurse which turns into a battle of mythic proportion. The center of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest is this battle between the two, which Kesey uses to represent many of our cultures most influential stories. The dominant theme in this novel is that of conformity and it's pressure on today's society. In the novel conformity is represented as a machine , or in Chief Bromden's mind a combine . To the Chief, the combine' depicts the conformist society of America, this is evident in one particular paragraph: This excerpt not only explains the Chiefs outlook on society as a machine but also his self outlook and how society treats a person who is unable to conform to society, or more poignantly one who is unable to cope with the inability to conform to society. The chief views the mental hospital as a big machine as well, which is run by The Big Nurse who controls everyone except McMurphy with wires and a control panel. In the Chiefs eyes McMurphy was missed by the combine, as the Chief and the other patients are casualties of it. Therefore McMurphy is an unconformist and is unencumbered by the wires of The Big Nurse and so he is a threat to the combine. McMurphy represents the antithesis to the mechanical regularity, therefore he represents nature and it's unregularity. Another key theme in Kesey's novel is the role of women is society and how it contradicts the males. In keeping with the highly contrasting forces of conformity verses creativity Kesey proceeds to compare the male role to spontaneity, sexuality, and nature and the female role to conformity, sexual repression and ultimately the psychological castration of the male. Nurse ...
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...
“Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge,” verbalizes Andrea Dworkin. Gender-roles have been ingrained in the every-day life of people all around the world since the beginnings of civilization. Both One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hamlet portray typical female stereotypes in different time periods. Due to the representation of women in literature like Hamlet by William Shakespeare and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kessey, and pop-culture, evidence of classic gender-based stereotypes in a consistently patriarchal world are still blatantly obvious in today’s societies.
The dominant discourse of conformity is characterised predominantly by influencing to obey rules described by Kesey’ novel ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. At the start of the novel, all the acute and the silence chronic conform to Nurse Ratched’s rules before the arrival of McMurphy. Since, she was in complete control over the ward until McMurphy arrived. After he arrived, he begins to take control of the patients. He begins to take the role of leader, a leader that was unexpected. Kesey has foregrounded the character, McMurphy to be different thus creating a binary opposite that is represented in the novel. Kesey shows the binary opposites as being good versus evil. The former represents the con man McMurphy, and the latter represents the head nurse, Nurse Ratched. An example of this would be, “She’s carrying her wicker bag…a bag shape of a tool box with a hemp handle…” (pg.4), showing that Nurse Ratched is a mechanic. McMurphy is portrayed as being a good character by revitalising the hope of the patients by strangling Nurse Ratched. This revitalise the hope for the pa...
Instantly, McMurphy radiates power and defiance that the other patients in the ward notably admire. He boldly challenges authority and battles conformity in the ward, determined to eradicate the authoritarian governance of the institution. He proves to be a symbol of defiance and gradually begins to beat out the authority in the ward. McMurphy’s influence on the other patients steadily grows as he singlehandedly instigates reform at the hospital.... ...
Everybody wants to be accepted, yet society is not so forgiving. It bends you and changes you until you are like everyone else. Society depends on conformity and it forces it upon people. In Emerson's Self Reliance, he says "Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater." People are willing to sacrifice their own hopes and freedoms just to get the bread to survive. Although the society that we are living in is different than the one the Emerson's essay, the idea of fitting in still exists today. Although society and our minds make us think a certain way, we should always trust our better judgment instead of just conforming to society.
Kappel, Lawrence. Readings on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Print.
As we are approaching the finale of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we encounter more and more scenes that are filled with vigor, clarity, and depth. The “fishing trip” scene happens to be one of them, as it drastically contrasts with the episodes prior to it, and discloses several ideas that Kesey strives to communicate to the reader throughout the narrative. The episode begins with Chief’s vivid description of the “Outside”. We follow the character as he reflects on re-entering the real world while connecting the descriptions with the previously mentioned idea of “Combine”. Chief’s vision of reality is evidently different from one of an ordinary person (if we were to define ordinariness as what society views as sanity). Every intricate detail
As all movies are created based on a book, there always seems to be changes and conflicting ideas. However, they still have the same main idea to the story line. The novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey and the movie directed by Miloš Forman deal with the main idea of society's control of natural impulses. The author/director want to prove that this control can be overcome. Although the movie and the book are very different from each other, they still have their similarities.