More handpicked essays just for you.
Analysis of one flew over the cuckoo nest
Impact of tv and films in society
Impact of tv and films in society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Analysis on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a comedy-drama based American movie, which was released in 1975. The movie is coordinated by Milos Forman. The two main leading characters of the movie are McMurphy and the head is Nurse Ratched. The story of the movie is taken from the novel by Ken Kesey which shows human conditions in a mental institution and that how they are exploited under cruel rule of Nurse Ratched. Jack Nicholson is a spectacular actor who plays the role of McMurphy as “Mac”, who is a culprit which remains involved in various criminal activities. The movie demonstrates Jack Nicholson in a fascinating way, who always remains stayed in his thoughts. A ruthless, unfaltering Nurse called …show more content…
The movie highlights the condition of mental patients in the hospital and how oppressive rule of Nurse flattens the abilities of patients. How dominance and supremacy affect your life? The hospital displays the society where the well-being of patients is suppressed under the authority of the head Nurse. Patients are dominated by the terms and conditions of authority. Nurse Ratched is a representation of society that always wants to control and rule others. She tries to persecute or oppresses others under her authority. Mental hospital and Nurse Ratched is an as illustration of intimidating and narrow-minded components of society. Ratched’s role is quite troublesome and difficult to understand. Once in a while, she makes a firm attempt to help the patients while sometimes she behaves in such a manner that she wants to aggravate them. Patients encounter the diverse sorts of treatments and therapies; sometimes they would experience electroshock while sometimes they would get lobotomy treatment. Nurse Ratched wants to maneuver her patients under her strict
In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, role reversal puts a woman, Nurse Ratched, in control of the ward, which is important in creating a contrast to traditional power. Within the ward Ratched has ultimate power by “merely [insinuating]” (p. 63) a wrongdoing and has control of the doctors. Soon after the first confrontation with Randle McMurphy (Mack), her power is demonstrated through the submissive and obedient manners of all there (152). Ratched is shown as having great power within the ward and outside, despite that time periods constriction of being a women, showing an important contrast to traditional power structures.
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...
In Ken Kesey’s novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, he engages the reader with Nurse Ratched’s obsession with power, especially against McMurphy. When Nurse Ratched faces multiple altercations with McMurphy, she believes that her significant power is in jeopardy. This commences a battle for power in the ward between these characters. One assumes that the Nurses’ meticulous tendency in the ward is for the benefit of the patients. However, this is simply not the case. The manipulative nurse is unfamiliar with losing control of the ward. Moreover, she is rabid when it comes to sharing her power with anyone, especially McMurphy. Nurse Ratched is overly ambitious when it comes to being in charge, leaving the reader with a poor impression of
In the story, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, patients live locked up in a restricted domain, everyday taking orders from the dictator, Nurse Ratched. Once McMurphy enters this asylum, he starts to rally everyone up and acting like this hospital is a competitive game between him and Nurse Ratched. McMurphy promotes negative behavior, such as, gambling and going against the rules, to mess around with the nurses and so he can be the leader that everyone looks up to. McMurphy soon learns that he might not be in control after all. Nurse Ratched decides who will be let out and when. After realizing why no one has stood up to Nurse Ratched before, he starts to follow rules and obey the nurses. This changes the whole mood of the hospital,
In the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” the characters are in a mental hospital for various reasons. Narrated by Chief Bromden, a large Native American man, the story tells mainly of a newcomer to the hospital, Randle McMurphy, who is not actually mentally ill, but pretends to be to escape work detail. A much-feared middle-aged woman named Mildred Ratched runs the hospital. She runs the hospital like a concentration camp, with harsh rules, little change, and almost no medical oversight. The “prisoners” have a large amount of fear of Nurse Ratched, as she rules the place like she is a soulless dictator, the patients get no say in any decision made. This is exemplified when McMurphy brings up the World Series, and the patients take a vote on it. Though everyone wants to watch it, they have so much fear for Nurse Ratched that they are too afraid to speak out against her wishes.
Unknown, Unknown Unknown. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Goodreads. Unknown, 8 June 2013. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
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.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey presents a situation which is a small scale and exaggerated model of modern society and its suppressive qualities. The story deals with the inmates of a psychiatric ward who are all under the control of Nurse Ratched, ‘Big Nurse’, whose name itself signifies the oppressive nature of her authority. She rules with an iron fist so that the ward can function smoothly in order to achieve the rehabilitation of patients with a variety of mental illnesses. Big Nurse is presented to the reader through the eyes of the Chief, the story’s narrator, and much of her control is represented through the Chief’s hallucinations. One of these most recurring elements is the fog, a metaphorical haze keeping the patients befuddled and controlled “The fog: then time doesn’t mean anything. It’s lost in the fog, like everyone else” (Kesey 69). Another element of her control is the wires, though the Chief only brings this u...
“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.
nurse manipulates the patients by forcing them to give up many of their personal secrets. They
While McMurphy tries to bring about equality between the patients and head nurse, she holds onto her self-proclaimed right to exact power over her charges because of her money, education, and, ultimately, sanity. The patients represent the working-class by providing Ratched, the manufacturer, with the “products” from which she profits—their deranged minds. The patients can even be viewed as products themselves after shock therapy treatments and lobotomies leave them without personality. The negative effects of the hospital’s organizational structure are numerous. The men feel worthless, abused, and manipulated, much like the proletariat who endured horrendous working conditions and rarely saw the fruits of their labor during the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom and United States in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (“Industrial Revolution” 630).
She determines when they take their medication and even tells them when they are able to bathe. Nurse Ratched takes control by taking away a man’s masculinity and making them feel small when they are there. She tells the patients that they aren’t real men and she treats them like they are children. The article “Fixing Men: Castration, Impotence, and Masculinity is Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” by Michael Meloy states, “Nurse Ratched—a sterile, distant, and oppressive feminine force who psychologically castrates the male patients” (3). Nurse Ratched is able to dominate every man in the ward because they are all afraid she will shame them and break them down in front of the other men on the ward and take away their character. Meloy proves this by explaining, “That to castrate a male is to take away the very essence of his being, or his ‘spirit’” (4). The men on the ward are afraid of what she might do or say to them if they go against
Nurse Ratched represents the dictatorial dehumanization, emasculation, and mechanization of society or, in Chief Bromden’s words, the “Combine”. The narrator, Chief Bromden, states that nurse Ratched comes into the ward with tools such as “wheels and gears, cogs polished to a hard glitter, tiny pills that gleam like porcelain, needles, forceps, watchmaker 's pliers, rolls of copper wire…” (P.4) with the intention of adjusting and fixing what society thinks is broken. Nurse Ratched’s name, similar to the tool ratchet, suggests that she is an “instrument of control” that is used to “ensure motion in one direction only” (Foley p.36). Through abuse (psychological and physical) and drugs, Nurse Ratched creates a mechanical or robotic feeling to
When someone abuses power and takes full control, they can lose all their power and respect quickly. If someone abuses their power, they can impose certain feelings and actions upon other people. In the novel, Ms. Ratched tries to conceal her personality from the hospital patients, so that she can maintain her level of power and control over them. If someone does something to annoy Ms. Ratched while nobody is nearby, she will show her real personality of hatred to get angry at the people who annoyed her, in the novel, Chief Bromden says, “She’s swelling up, swells till her back’s splitting out the white uniform. . .
She controlled every movement and every person’s actions and thoughts. She made the doctors so miserable when they did not follow her instructions, that they begged to be transferred out if. “I'm disappointed in you. Even if one hadn't read his history all one should need to do is pay attention to his behavior on the ward to realize how absurd the suggestion is. This man is not only very very sick, but I believe he is definitely a Potential Assaultive” (). This quote from the book illustrated how Nurse Ratched controlled her ward. She manipulated people into siding with her regardless of whether it was the right decision. This was malpractice by Nurse Ratched because she did not allow the doctor, who was trained to diagnose patients, to do his job properly. Instead, she manipulated the doctor to diagnose the patients incorrectly in order to benefit her interests rather than those of the